Egos

Egos weigh so much that sometimes I am surprised a body can carry them around.

Bossy big parts of us. Fantastic little dictators.  Heavy laden burdens that complicate everything they come in contact with.

Negotiating with an ego requires more finesse than bull painting in a china shop.  The target is huge, but the possibility for collateral damage is almost a sure thing.

Alone

I hear all sorts of comments about the way I choose to live.  It seems it is almost impossible for people to believe that anyone would choose to live alone if they didn't have to.

I wonder how many people choose misery over their own company, because there are lots of things worse than living alone.  Imagine the best moment of your morning being the minute you arrive at work.   I loved my job so much I now volunteer and do it for free, but I no longer need it to escape the unhappiness of home.

I will not trade my life for someone to pay my bills, chauffeur me around, or fix my house.  Though if all other parts of our relationship are monumentally wonderful, I could appreciate those things.

I have good friends and family members where mutual respect, love and an appreciation for what the other has to bring into the relationship enriches my life immeasurably.  That is so much more valuable than a half-hearted, needy relationship, where people find fault instead of love.

Being a perfect person isn't necessarily being perfect.  It is just being perfectly suited for each other and that requires a level of wisdom and maturity some people don't seem to have. 

The biggest concern

I watch the house hunters on TV turning up their noses and saying things like, "This is so outdated.  It is from the eighties, or nineties.  No one uses oak cabinets, or built ins or whatever, anymore."

Of course they don't!

How would designers and retailers stay in business if they did?

They cannot bear to look at certain colors.  The wrong appliances appall them.  The walk in closets are never big enough for her clothes.   Must haves are often almost obscene compared to what many people in the world live with.

I love seeing the inside of houses, but I truly hope the people are not as shallow as they appear while trying to look sophisticated.   Personal taste should consist of more than popular trends.

Whenever the biggest concern in life is where to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars, you are blessed.

by the sea

I did not see the ocean until I was in my mid thirties and we stopped at Daytona beach.

I was enraptured by the tide that crept in that night, the idea that something so large could move in the moonlight with such fluid grace amazed me.

I was both frightened and awed by the thoughts of what lived in that great body of seemingly endless water and stung by something I saw but did not even know was an animal, a green ring that  turned out to be a jellyfish.

All of my children were enthralled by this phenomena too, but one of them was marked as a water baby come home.

Yesterday he introduced his children to the ocean on the other side of this huge country and a life long yearning came into being.  From now on he will live by the sea, by the beautiful sea . . .

Of all the gifts

Children want so many things.  Their want- lists are long and vivid.  They are children!

Adults try to be a bit more sophisticated.  They still want things, but the more abstract stuff like life, liberty and world peace show up.
 
We want friends, good jobs, great coworkers.  It is truly difficult to give people the perfect gift, the universal one, the one almost everyone might appreciate.

Yet, I see it everyday in the eyes of school children who clamor to be heard, who are desperate to talk to me, who flock around me doing everything they can to be noticed. 

I see it in the eyes of strangers who strike up odd conversations at the check out in the store, on airplanes, at bus stops.

And sadly I see it at restaurants where children act out because their parents are on cell phones, at the beach because their parents are sleeping in the sun, or talking to other parents.
 
What we all want most, what we crave, what some of us will do anything to get -- is attention!

Not just the warm presence of another body, or group of bodies, but somebody who is actively focusing on us -- listening, responding, really paying attention.

Of all the gifts we can give another person, our undivided attention is the greatest one of all.

Back to Normal

Forty three years ago we were playing Bridge with an elderly couple in one of our many Bridge Groups and they told us about this great house their friends were selling.   An hour later they had a disagreement over one of their hands and she slapped him so hard he fell off his chair!

I will never forget that night.  It was the only time I ever saw a Bridge game totally escalate into physical violence and it was the night we learned about our first home.

The house had many quirks, so many I could write a whole thought on them, but the best thing everyone teased us about was the fact that it was in Normal, Illinois.  We were finally Normal people!

Normal is actually a very good place to live -- for many reasons.  When I came back here after moving around through Illinois, Missouri and North Carolina, I settled in Bloomington, which is the same city, but different governments, different water, and no Normal people.

Today I began my move back to Normal.   By this time next week I will be there, lock, stock, and barrel.

Friends in small spaces

My mother always insisted on having a big house, probably because she grew up in a huge one, but I think what she forgot was that three families lived in her house as a child.  Her grandparents, her aunt and uncle, and her own family with her parents and three brothers.

My children were brought up in a large home too, five bedrooms, four bathrooms, but small spaces have always intrigued me.

I saw a book, Material World:A Global Family Portrait in the nineties and I was fascinated.  A man took photos of families from all over the world with their possessions out in front of their homes.

My son and his family just packed all of their remaining possessions into an 8 by 12 pod and set off for a new adventure, living in an apartment.  I am moving into a 425 square foot apartment next week.  By the world's standards we will both be living in relative luxury.  By television's standards we will be in beggarly small places.

I could not live in one of those adorable tiny portable homes I read about because I cannot climb up into a loft to sleep and make the bed on my knees, but the idea appeals to me.  Sorta. 

In the end I think a certain amount of space makes for better living partners.  How much that is depends on each family and the way they socialize with each other and their friends.

Odd math

I am pretty sure the happiest couples I know are the ones who have their own lives to live as well as  their family life.  Expecting another human being to fill all your wants and needs is asking the impossible.  Eventually there is going to be resentment on one or both parts.

It is easier to see the value of something when there is a little space between you.    If you get too close all you can see are the pores, the holes, the imperfections, or you begin to believe you are really one person.  As romantic as that sounds it literally isn't true and one of you will end up realizing it before the other.

The couples I see that seem both content and happy treasure their time together because it isn't all the time.  

Life isn't all about another person.  Making the other person happy should be a joyful experience.  It is a necessary part of any relationship, but it can't be the primary goal in life. 

There are sacrifices loving couples make. There is me time and there is our time.  It is the complex variety and skill at handling all of this that seems to produce the best relationships.

In the end, two wholes make a better whole than two halves.

Ode to bestest

Thoughts of you are like a dream manifested
And brought to life in a fairytale
A soundless voice speaking to me untested
Of heart's desires and secrets so frail.
That butterfly wings and ladybug feet
Would shatter their existence in a second
But you understood and made it all sweet
Like split aparts whose fingers beckoned
Dark thoughts rose up in glorious splendor
Becoming the first tendrils of spring.

Unlikely child of a universe so structured
The labyrinth between was all eternity
Until your innocence and persistence ruptured
And the boundaries burst open to maternity
Born backwards into blessed being
By similitude undreamed by any
Whose open eyes were yet unseeing
What hearts saw when they were ready.
Boundaries were spanned with sleek abandon
Becoming the first blooms of summer.

Sweet soul whose life burst forth like living roman candles
Sparks igniting everything they landed on
Energy and creativity becoming handles
Baskets overflowing like blessed rain song
Sprinkling abundance as you walked
Spreading joy with every glance
Opening minds whenever you talked
Becoming the steps of the dance
Surely goodness and mercy settled in
And spread their roots forever.

Seek and ye shall find

I think people find what they are looking for.

It is so easy to find fault with individuals, with ideas, with the world.  I don't know of any great sages in history who had people lining up to hear what was wrong with them.

 It's not the telephone, the television, computers, or texting that keeps people apart.  It's personalities.

There are people I will drive ten or more hours to see -- and love every moment because it brings us closer.
 
I feel good when I am with them, when I think of them; I am glad they just exist.

And then there are the people who always want to tell me what is wrong -- with me, with you, with everyone else.  They make me uncomfortable.

Life is not a popularity contest and even though opposites may attract each other, it would take a saint to attract some people.

I'm not up to saint standards, so I'm not looking for saintly people, but I love the people I find.

Easter Sunday

The sun lights up my front window on this Easter morning and I find myself lost in memories as I watch the little gray squirrel gamboling in the grass on the boulevard. 

The bushes outside my window are just budding.  Their bright green nubs reminding me of our bushes when I was a child.  I will miss this neighborhood, it tied me to my childhood in Springfield, Illinois where I lived in a neighborhood similar to this one near Washington Park.

Wide concrete sidewalks, gnarly old trees along the boulevards and in the yards, large shady porches and windows big enough to light up a room from sunrise to sunset, these houses were built to be lived in. 

I wonder how many children have colored Easter Eggs here, or searched for them as if they were solid gold?  I remember that terrible anticipation that kept me awake the night before as I lay in bed listening for the Easter Bunny, thinking I would never go to sleep.

Easter morning dawned way before my parents were ready to rise, but they did, so we could rush downstairs and find our baskets full of eggs and candy!  The carrot we left on the note thanking him would have two huge teeth marks in it and I remember envisioning this giant creature who showed up once a year to bring us candy.  I, who would walk a block out of my way to avoid the little dogs on the way to my piano lesson, had no fear of a six foot white rabbit.  (Which is how I saw him.)

Shiny patent leather shoes and purses, white gloves, big billowy skirts and a hat, always a hat so we could sing, "In your Easter bonnet" made the day perfect. 

Relatives began arriving late in the morning for the Easter ham and deviled eggs.  The aroma of fresh baked rolls made my mouth water and I played with my candy making nests in the green plastic grass, creating scenario after scenario like I would for the next week until my sister sneaked all the candy away for herself.  I seldom ate any of it except for a few chocolate eggs and maybe the chocolate bunny, but that never dulled the joy.

If it rained on Easter Sunday we knew it would rain for the next seven Sundays.  We were full of traditions and superstitions and bursting with a zest for life that belongs mostly to the very young.

Extras

Any child born in the last sixty years has probably dreamed of living in a Disney castle, queen or king of the kingdom, doling out justice, love and healing to the people below them.

We see ourselves as displaced rich people. The allure of movies like Gone With The Wind and Ben Hur is the similitude we find between ourselves and the people we admire.

Almost no one I know sees themselves as the buffoon, or bad guy.  And if there is some relationship with the poor person in the movie, we see ourselves as the exception.

I sometimes wonder if evolution has not only produced the features on my face and number of legs I have, but also conditioned me to live vicariously, and quietly, in the shadow of the few powerful and wealthy.  I grew up revering them and thinking they were all practitioners of noblesse oblige.

They in turn often unite the rest of us in feeling entitled and content with our underling status by giving us scapegoats in the guise of people of a different race, color, or religion.  We are allowed to rise up and barter for the same things over and over again so that we never get around to the real problems.

Life is never as simple as it appears in a movie.  And if it was, most of us would be extras. 

Happily ever after

Forty four years ago today I donned the uniform that girls of my generation yearned for.  The one many went to college for, the MRS. 

I thought it was the happily ever after I had been waiting for all my life.  I imagined birds singing,  Deer watching with tear filled eyes of joy.  Prince Charming smiling at me from the altar as I floated towards him in layers of pearls and white fluff.

I sublimated that fact that I had been looking at Prince Charming through eyes trying to see what wasn't there, but from that moment on I would dedicate my entire life to fulfilling his smallest wish, (or at least the ones I deemed worthy of filling.)

Those became fewer and fewer as time went on.  It never occurred to me that we both might have been happier if we were in it together and not just for him, (but I have to say I wanted him to want what I wanted.)

The trouble was that we both changed as we grew up.  At twenty I wanted only to make him happy (as long as it didn't offend the sensibilities I was told I had.)  At thirty I wanted him to love our children the way I did.

By that time we were both on such disparate paths that we would never again walk side by side, but we stuck it out another nineteen years.

By the end a counselor told us that the only thing we had in common was that we both loved him. Looking back I don't think that was true.    I don't think either one of us loved him anymore.

Our final separation was one of the most loving things each of us did for the other.  It set us free to find ourselves, unencumbered by all the emotional and physical baggage we had been carrying around for nearly thirty years.

It took a while, but for me the last few years have been some of the best I've ever known.

Beyond the genie

Dreams and wishes and hopes!  Oh my!

So many stories written about them.  In theory they are paths to happiness, but are they really?

Beyond all the stories of genies tricking people into wasting wishes, is the discontent of wanting something I can't have, or that isn't here, or that may never occur.

I heard that Lincoln told a little girl, whose father was killed in the Civil War, to imagine herself happy at some point in the future and she would eventually get there.  When dreams, wishes, hopes, are a rope to keep us alive, I understand their value.

They are more likely to be visions of something I think will make me happy when happiness lies in the moment.

In this moment, this one teeny tiny moment, I can find peace, if not happiness, in simply breathing in and breathing out.  Realizing this and living in this small place can be the path to true happiness.

No matter what I think I know, the next moment is really the unknown.  It may be awful, or wonderful.  It may just be a jog in the road to something bigger and better.  It may actually be the end.

So my wish is:  let me live in this moment fully.

Practically Perfect People

People generally find what they are looking for, but what they are looking for is not always what they think it is.

I can prove myself right beyond a shadow of a doubt.  I can be self righteously brilliant a million times over.  I can be so adept at doing things it is scary. 

But in the end I may still be a sad lonely person.

Perfection is not at the top of Maslow's hierarchy of needs.  We don't need perfect people in our lives and most of us surely don't want them.

We want empathetic people.  People who understand who and where we are --  and like us both because of and in spite of that.

Imperfections are kinda like stuffing.  They can get old and be cumbersome, but they also make us cuddly.

Gracious!

Trying to be gracious to a person who probably doesn't even know there is such a word can be -- well, trying.

Such a person goes blindly and boldly forward, rolling over other people's money, time, and patience with blithe ignorance.

The sad part is I need to keep restraining myself, because my meaner side keeps stepping up to the plate, ready to educate this bumbler in clear and uncertain terms.

And that would be bad because he really means well.  At least I think he does.   I hope he does.

I am bending over backwards to do the right thing.

Side effects

Modern medicine is probably one of the most dangerous things in my world today.

It knows a little bit about how to treat symptoms and it goes about that with unbridled zeal.

It admits that not all bodies react the same way, but in the interest of doing good work, it does whatever works on the highest common denominator.  Curing some.  Killing some.  Maybe helping the others -- some.

Unfortunately, it also does lots of unintentional harm. 

Left to heal on its own, my body often takes a long time, but it also does a custom job geared precisely to me and what I need while eliminating unnecessary side effects and complications.

I think medical interference needs to come as a last resort instead of a first.  At least for those of us whose bodies do okay on their own and have radical reactions to outside chemicals.

The missing cookie

The little girl knew that when she grew up she would marry a little old man and they would bake gingerbread boys and girls for the rest of her life.

She also knew that some of these sweet little cookies would jump the tray, run away from home and be eaten by sly old foxes, because that is what happened if you broke tradition.  You came to a bad end.

All of her little gingerbread men, except one, ran away and she kept waiting for that mean old fox to eat them, but he never showed up.  Instead one little boy became a printer and another became a musician and the others did all sorts of amazing things.

You can guess what happened to the one who never left home.

In the end the little old man ran away too and the little old woman discovered there was a whole world out there with a million wonderful things to do and most of the foxes were just nightmares in disguise.

She stopped baking cookies and telling them tales of terror and began writing stories of her own. And while no one lived happily ever after, the unknown gave their lives a richness and full flavored robustness they had never dreamed existed.

In the eye of the beholder

Who are the people we play dress up for, the people that we meet, walking down our life's main street, the people that we meet each day?

Public personas  reflect the person we want to be, or think we should be, or are afraid not to be.

A woman I volunteer with mentioned that when she went home, she and her husband put on their "home uniforms" and it occurred to me that most of us probably have those.  These are the clothes that reflect who we really are.

I run around in a pair of elastic waist crop pants, clunky Naot sandals, and a huge comfy shirt.  That's it.  If I could get by in those everywhere now, I would.  But the truth is, I am uncomfortable when I go out in public that way.   Some part of me still needs to impress people and that bothers me a little bit.

So I don underclothes and over clothes to shape me and shape your view of me.

We found those people in National Geographic with neck rings and ear lobe discs odd way back when.  It was the way those societies displayed their wealth, their station in life.  A lot of ours aren't all that different.

Perhaps in the future we will cut to the chase and simply wear little bands of modesty with electronic read outs displaying our net worth.  Beauty will be based on dollars and cents.

But eventually I think it will be simpler, more functional, closer to what we all wear at home.  A very long time from now. . .

Blooming brains

Thinking is not an easy art to teach.

Much easier are the so called "facts" that tumble around the universe, less easily mutated, but only worth what a thinker can do with them.

A good teacher reaches out and tickles his student's fancies and interests, opening doors, watering ideas and placing them in the light, doing whatever it takes to bring a brain into bloom.

Maneuvering around sacred cows, digging through worm holes of ignorance, lighting candles in caverns measureless to man, it is an endless attempt to share a love of learning so deep and so committed that it will not quit.

So here is to the teacher who stands alone, at the head of the class, dodging the tomatoes and jibes of those who truly do not know.

Loving things to do

My best friend and I enjoy each other.

Whether we are watching the television, reading a book, or just doing our own thing in the same room, it is better when we do it together.

We can talk on the phone for hours, day after day, without running out of things to talk about.

I wouldn't go so far as to say we just like to hear each other breathe, but it is pretty close.

We both just enjoy making the other one happy and that is a pretty loving thing to do.

I was thirteen

I remember being thirteen years old.  We had moved eight times by then, always trying to find a place where people with too much education, too little money and four kids, each with a medical problem that was expensive could live comfortably.

I played oboe, my fourth instrument, because in the process of moving we had lived in places that didn't have an orchestra or violin teacher.  I still played piano, but just for me, at home.

Pulled out of our big classes and stuffed into tiny ones where three of us worked on our own, writing papers, taking oral tests, and creating our own special little forms of havoc, I wanted, more than anything, to just be "normal." 

I dreamed of wearing plaid skirts and walking to school down streets lined with brick houses.  I wanted to sit anonymously in the back of a huge room filled with kids doing basic math and reading the same book.

I had holey soles and an atheist father and in true teenage fashion, I wanted Capezio shoes and St. Catherine was my hero.

Except my father was also my hero and he was lucky to put shoes on all of us at all.  Life was full of angst and contradictions.

It hasn't changed as much as I would like, but I don't take it quite as seriously as I once did.

Bliss

I have moved so many times in my life, five times before I was five!   If I were a wild creature I would think it was grooming for the rest of my life.  As a human being it may be that it was only setting the pattern.

I live with the certain knowledge that life if full of change. 

Anything relying on possessions or location is likely to be impermanent.  These things wear out, mutate, change!  They can be lost in a rain storm.  Blow away in the wind.  Fade from age.

Attachment is terrifying.

So . . . I am always testing the waters.

What does it take to make something go away?  What is it like to live without something, or someone?  What can withstand the rigors of time -- and me?

Security is a blissful concept.  Balancing precariously on the present, it lights my way.

The best deal in town

My sister and I cannot live together, but we are possibly the most compatible siblings that ever existed.

She is a borderline hoarder and I am a greedy minimalist.

Clutter drives me crazy.  And yet . . . I collect things in some mysterious way that still baffles me.  One day I just wake up and I am overwhelmed by all the "stuff" I have. 

I feel like that camel trying to get through the eye of a needle, bogged down with the bounty of my fortune.  That is when I tear through the house like a tornado on a mission, cleaning out closets and drawers, wiping out pantries, piling the "extra" into small mountains of relief and . . .

Call my sister.

She swoops in, gathers up everything that fits into her car and drives home sure that she has garnered the best deal in town and . . .  

We both sleep better.

Row, row, row your boat

I am always being sent cute little articles about how "we turned out okay" in spite of all the safety precautions that were missing, poor diets that were common place and because there were no video games to keep anyone inside.

First of all no one mentions: These are the survivors!  So far.  The ones who weren't killed falling off their bikes, or dead from skin cancer, or heart attacks.  

They are also the lucky ones.

And. . . like people across the ages, these are the people more comfortable with the known, the ones who equate it with the tried and true when it is mostly just the tried.

Life is a river and it would be silly to stop taking rocks out of it as we move downstream.  Not everything we do today will be done tomorrow.  The process goes on and on.

I call that hope.

Control

Uncertainty is probably the most difficult situation to live with.

Knowing means I can make plans.

Making plans makes me feel as if I have some sort of control.

And control, no matter how much of an illusion it really is, makes life feel doable.

Taking out the trash

When I moved into my present apartment I bought an outdoor trash can and placed it behind the house. 

I only generate about one very small bag of trash a week, so I seldom used it, but a young woman moved in shortly after that and she used it frequently.  I didn't mind after I realized she put loose garbage in it.  I knew I wasn't likely to use it again.

She slowly commandeered all the other trash cans behind the house, including the ones without tops and garbage began spilling over onto the parking lot.  We thought the problem would be solved when garbage day rolled around.

Only she missed it, or so we thought.

She seemed like a nice, if slightly full of herself, young woman who only took out the trash, or parts of it when the spirit moved her.  It moved her less and less over time.  In self defense the rest of us did various things to preserve our living space.

This winter when snow filled the parking lot, the urban sculpture in our lot froze to the ground in an odd arrangement of cans, rugs, and other less desirable things.  In what I suppose was a cleaning frenzy she began sweeping the litter in her kitchen out the inside door to the landing between our two apartments and leaving the dryer lint in the basement on the floor.  I had become a personal sanitation engineer.

Yesterday I noticed an entire set of living room furniture piled by the street.  The sprawl of junk in the back lot increased and I was ecstatic! That meant only one thing to me.

Someone was finally taking out the trash!

They picked her up at eight o'clock this morning.

The long haul

Somebody needs to let the word out.  Raising kids isn't easy.  Not if you are doing it right.

Sure, anyone can have kids and "bring them up," but bringing up happy, well-adjusted adults is an art -- not a given.

It can happen in the worst of circumstances and be absent in the best, but like anything else, the odds improve immensely when done right.

You can't just "be nice."   You have to have to be "there" and paying attention.

It is a job often relegated to babysitters or "affordable" daycare while the family finances are put in the hands of the finest people money can find.  And while a fifteen year old girl, or sixty year old granny might keep your child fed and alive, she may not have the skills, tenacity, or desire, to mold it into the best it can be.  The same is true for a business who puts a number of children under the supervision of an overworked, disgruntled employee.

Ideally children grow up with a constant caregiver who realizes that all people have different needs and dealing with those needs requires loving encouragement, focused attention and firm redirection.  It is a time consuming "real" job and it takes a lot of love (and time) to do it right. 

Good foundations (yesterday's thot!)

Good things happen all the time, but the best things are more likely to happen if I do the work.

I often hear people say, "He is so lucky," or "She was born smart.  She's so lucky."  But luck is often made and smart is no substitute for hard work.

Behind most good fortune is more sacrificing and hard labor than many people might imagine.

In my experience, if I want something badly enough, I will do almost anything to make it happen.  It doesn't always work, but it is a lot more likely than if I just sit around whining and waiting for someone else to make it happen.

It is possible to get by on the good will and labor of others, but if that fails it is nice to have experience to help pick up the pieces.  Knowing how to do the work makes all the difference in the world.

Expecting to do the work is laying the foundation for luck.