Waiting

He crawled into the picture.

Big. Brawny. A baritone of a caterpillar.

Shiny head devoid of hair, legs all working in tandem.

Munching on maple leaves and drinking dandelion wine.

My heart lurched when he rose up to sing.

Intoxicating creature with a beautiful note

Spinning ephemeral strands around himself.

I waited seven long years for him to emerge

From that cocoon of dreams.

Eager to see what he had become.

He emerged

A big brawny baritone of a caterpillar

Spinning ephemeral dreams.

Oh my mama

We thought you were so wonderful.

My mother's mother was almost idolized by her children and the people in her town. They once had a day named for her because of her good deeds, Christian values, and actual beauty even unto her nineties. So I suppose it stood to reason that we would do the same with our mother, her daughter.

Brought up to believe everything your mother does is in your best interest and other worldly wise is a hazard for people like us, because in the end there has to be a realization that she is only mortal and a product of her own age and upbringing.

My mother was often histrionic, throwing glasses and chairs at walls, quick to backhand me when the spirit moved her and I deserved it. Even something like flinching could bring that on, my mother believed that if I flinched or ducked when she came near me I must have done something wrong.

She doled out advice at opportune times, like my first date when I dared to look in the mirror at the dress she made for me and the hair she styled for me and say, "I look pretty." Her response? "You aren't pretty if you think so."

She had a mean streak and it was not always passive aggressive, but that was there too. It was another one of those legacies she passed down to my sister and me.

I don't know what her thoughts on child rearing were. She was dead before I realized I had spent years learning not to do many of the things I thought were her gifts to me, but I am certain she felt we were the most important part of her life. She loved us the way her mother loved her. She loved us to the very best of her ability and I think that must have been very confusing and frustrating for her.

It wasn't until I reconnected with my uncle, her youngest brother that I realized much of this, because his life has been much like hers was. Like children in a cult, we were taught our mothers were saints and not only saints, but all knowing, all wise saints.

The other day I had one of those eye opening experiences that happen to people always working on themselves. I remembered the things my mother-in-law-to-be once said and did for me. They were not the things my mother said and did, so I ignored them, even sometimes looked down on them as annoying meddling things.

She told me I was beautiful and should wear my hair back to accentuate my face. I thought she was old and out of date.She thought I was too young to get married, she wanted me to, at least, finish college first and I thought she was just trying to keep us from getting married. She told me not to let my husband-to-be ever hurt me, to remember who I was and value myself.. She bought me lovely clothes, made me wonderful knitted outfits. She took me to school when she was teaching and let me help out in her classroom.

She often said I was the daughter she always wanted and somehow I found that wrong too, but I think that might have been real mothering. Offering kindness and wisdom that was given to make me a happier and a better person.

I think she loved me.

And I felt if I accepted that I was being disloyal to my own mother who made it very clear that the most powerful form of showing I respected and loved her was to do and be like her.

Dominos

Dominos! Perfectly matched little blocks with dots on them that mimic the game of life in so many ways.

You can count those dots, add them up, match them, or ignore them all together.

You could just build little projects with them, like houses, or trains, compete against other people with them, or you could line them up like goals on the pathway of life. Knock one over and if you did it right, the next one will fall, and on and on and on.

Of course it's not quite so simple. It never is once you get past the block building stage. Then it becomes a game of control. Outwitting other people, finding your goals, finding your balance, seeing how steady you are.

The better your balance, the more pronounced your steadiness, the more likely you are to set up long range goals, even intricate multi faceted goals. We've all seen those guys whose dominos fill up a whole room or even more!

But anybody, literally anything with any substance at all, could come in and knock them all down. That's when you have to remember it was you who set them up in the first place and you can do it again -- making any alterations you deem necessary. (Or just wanna make.)

These are your dominos and this is your life.

Quirks

I like to think of myself as a calm, reasonable person, but the truth is probably closer to something like obsessive compulsive perfectionist.

One year my mother asked me to keep an eye open for a tiny baby grand piano for my niece for Christmas. I told her I found one at Miller's Hardware and I got it for her. When we opened it, it was so disappointing . . .

Now, nearly 45 years later I seem to still be on the look out for a good baby grand child's piano!

I saw a add pop up on the internet this morning and jumped right in to evaluate it! For who? Certainly not my niece who just turned 47 this year.

And if that were my only quirk . . .

Doing nothing

Time flies when you're doing nothing.

I see that it has been three days since I wrote a thot and I wonder how that can be. I have tons of time to do whatever I want and I seem to get less done than usual.

I meet friends for lunch, draw some, play Words With Friends, read some, watch Netflix, Prime and other Roku channels. I take care of my plants and my apartment, and I talk on the phone for hours, but it seems I still have tons of time on my hands that I should put to better use.

Part of it is that I don't feel especially good right now. Tis the season to have allergies and our damp, springy weather is flooded with grass seed, cotton wood seed, and probably a million other flying things that make me miserable no matter what medicine I take.

I seem to be better at doing things that will end soon. I don't want to waste an opportunity, but give me an infinite amount of anything and I put off doing it -- because I can.

That would be okay if I always knew when something would end, or run out, or die, but I don't.

Guilt can be an intense motivator, but it is not a fun one.

The next generation

Most people would not start a business without spending time learning the skills necessary to make it successful. It takes a lot of time, patience, studying and time. Did I say time enough? Something worth doing right requires a certain amount of time. Very few people would disagree with that.

Raising children is no different. It's going to take time, your time, to do it right. You might get away with hiring a full time trained nanny to do it, but then what is the point of having children? Are they just little place markers in the world created to make you look good, to play with like happy puppies when you feel the need, to point to with pride and say, "that's my boy, or girl?"

In reality they represent the person who raised them. The nanny. The sixteen year old babysitter. The woman with no education who babysits for the money. The daycare facility who hires people they pay minimum wages to. Their school. The neighborhood gang.

You dip the little sponge you created into various and sundry pots and they absorb whatever is there.

Unless you take it seriously and do more.

It's not about producing an art piece you can present to the world at some certain age and say, "This is my son, my daughter!"

It is about coaxing a human being with intricate and unique potential into full bloom.

If you want to bring a child into the world you should be prepared to spend time learning how to bring this particular child up and then doing it with great patience, understanding and love.

Of course children can raise themselves and get by. They can grow up strong and be successful like petunias in an onion patch, but they are more likely to find themselves in danger of being pulled up by the roots, tossed into a heap of crazy, scary feelings and left to fend for themselves wondering why there are other people who seem to have better skills in life.

The children we love deserve more and while we may not always succeed, it would be a better world if we at least gave it our best.

Having a child just because you can is very selfish. There is so much more to it than that. You are raising the next president of the country, the teacher who will influence hundred of other lives, the engineers and artists and scientists and  parents who will create the next generation of the world you will grow old in.

People

People who need people are the luckiest people in the world. Or maybe not.

I do need people in my life, but I have one of those irascible personalities that has a life all its own and sometimes when I'm with people they think I'm being quiet when I'm really wrestling with that inner me. These smiles can be smiles of steel, holding back annoyance and testy comments I cannot allow to get out.

I realize that no one agrees with anyone one hundred percent, but there are people out there who bring out the worst in me and I'm starting to find that as I age I need to avoid them. Maybe not so much because of who they are, but who I am when I am with them.

You might tell me that these people are here to teach me something, or that I will be a better person for spending time with them, or whatever people who like suffering tell other people, but the main thing I have learned is that together we are like a perpetual angst machine. We are like fire and water, sun and rain, lions and lambs, and one of us might eat the other if we ever let our hair down and let it all hang out.

Now I do have to admit that most people do not affect me this way. Only a few that I have known for years and years and who are so deeply entrenched in their own abysses that there are never any surprises, or hope. The unfortunate thing is that these are actually people I love. They are fam-I-lee so to speak.

And that only makes it worse.

Sad

I know people who occasionally say things that are politically incorrect, or even racist and are horrified when they realize what they've said. That is simply ignorance and while it would be better not happening it becomes a learning process.

Unfortunately I also know people who swear they are not racist who, over the course of time, show that they certainly are. They try to hide it. They deny it emphatically if you call them on it and there is little hope that they will change.

The world will be a better place when no one feels the need to describe the person they are talking about by the color of their skin. As if that should make a difference. It does make a difference in our world now though.

And that is sad.

Invisible

How does a person explain emotions so another person truly understands them?

Growing up we didn't talk about emotions. I knew if I cried I would wake the baby, or keep Daddy from studying, or upset mommy who was already very busy.

I knew if I laughed too loud or got too silly bad things could happen. One phrase I remember hearing over and over was, laugh after seven, cry before eleven.

Expressing emotion was like being belly side up in the jungle. Not just bad form, but possibly dangerous.

My sister remembers talking with our grandmother who told her, "When people ask how you are just say fine, because they don't really care."

Later in life I had friends who said FINE meant: Fucked up, Insecure, Neurotic and Enabling!

So what don't I feel, or maybe more to the point, what don't I know I am feeling and what can I do about it?

I'm reading Running on Empty by Jonice Webb, PhD and it's both enlightening and fascinating..

It talks about those empty spaces in life that were not intentional, but still had far reaching repercussions. I would recommend it for everyone, before, during and after raising children and even if you never had a child. Emotional neglect is the invisible fence around us that nobody knows exists.

The loving way to go

Someone recently commented that I always look so happy. Hearing that makes me feel good.

I don't do many things out of obligation anymore. I prefer to do things that will really make people happier. Especially if I love them.

I don't like to say no, but I will if I love you enough to do what I feel  is in your best interest.

That is the difference between being truly loving and trying to impress people.

Having someone to love is the most glorious feeling in the world - most of the time - but it can be hard too.

If I had to choose between being loved and loving?

That's easy!

I would pick loving.

In a better world

In a country known for shooting its children I wonder if maybe our Puritan forefathers got it all wrong from the get go.

Our prisons are full of people contributing nothing to the world right now. Our politics are vindictive and headed towards third world harsh. Our schools are becoming shams that produce test takers. And the list goes on.

There are other places who do some of these things much better than we do and although this world does seem to cater to the rich, they can be held accountable if we choose to make it so.

Instead of creating commercial warehouses for punishing people what if we created rehabilitative places where people are retrained and eased back into society as useful citizens. It can be done. It is already being done in some other countries.

Instead of schools based on tests and numbers and regimentation, what if we taught children in different ways? This is already being done, right here in this country and it works! It is possible to teach almost everything in a way that creates true learning: how to think, how to apply what you learn, how to make sense of the lists of facts that many students are simply asked to remember and regurgitate right now, so their schools can garner financial aid.

What if we looked at the people in our neighborhood as people filled with possibilities instead of creatures with religious, ethnic, and financial faults?

Compassion, respect, understanding, creativity, are all alternatives for the way we do things now. This country really could be a better place.

Happiness

You cannot wait for the stress in life to go away before you begin living.

You can get creative.

Jump over, under, or around it.

Even leap into it and work your way out, but waiting for it to go away is like thinking the snow will roll itself up into three balls, call in the coal and expect a hat to come blowing down the street.

Cause if you wait too long there won't be any snow, sunny days, or even rain to sing in. Camelot won't really blow the leaves away over night and the simple joys of maiden hood come to those maidens who get out there and help rake.

Hop to it!

Ghost stories

Like children sitting around a campfire telling ghost stories, adults can sometimes scare themselves.

I've lived in quite a few houses and apartments since my divorce and even though I scared myself a bit in the one in the country by thinking up ghost stories, I was never really afraid in any of them.

It is always possible to pass off the wafting scent of bath powder to an old lady who over indulged in it when she once lived there and the idea that someone might look back at me from a window while I am outside washing it is frightening to talk about, but never happened. Ghost stories.

Seeing things out of the corner of an eye, especially at night, is usually attributable to shadows and lights and reflections. Especially if it is very late at night and exhaustion is setting in.

But imagine turning around and being startled by someone standing behind you who  immediately disappears in the middle of the day. I thought fleeting reflection! Except so far I have not been able to recreate that reflection in three weeks.

Last night I woke up at 2:35 AM and an old woman was standing behind my big recliner facing the wall. She had a very large nose, big hoop earrings sort of  like mine and some sort of distorted dark hair, or wig that I couldn't quite make out. She didn't move. She just stood there and I thought I must still be asleep, or on the edges of sleep. I lay there looking at her, expecting her to disappear, or to evolve into my floor lamp, or any of a million things like that. For nearly five minutes I lay there looking at her and gradually became more and more terrified until I finally sat up to run away and she disappeared. I slept the rest of the night with a light on. I was so scared.

I have since spent quite a bit of time trying to recreate that look and make sense of what happened. Surely it was some really super lucid nightmare. It never moved. I didn't hurt me. There was something vaguely familiar about the earrings. She wasn't as tall as me and she seemed very old, but surely she was just a bad bit of beef. Surely.

Addendum: I still have no explanation for that first reflection, but the old woman standing behind my recliner in the middle of the night is the way the little bit of light that exists reflects off my floor lamp. I thought it might have been so, but it has taken a while to figure out. The light has to be just right and it probably doesn't hurt that I was just waking up.

Much ado about nothing

In the long course of history so many of the things that get people all riled up are only temporary fads.

Like how we dress, or dress our children. Long haired boys were considered terrible rebels in the sixties when the Beatles came on the scene, but it was totally the opposite in ancient history. Men wearing skirts was normal for the ancient Romans, Scots, and many other cultures, but here?

White wigs on the lords and ladies of the olden days was fine, but green and pink hair today raises eyebrows and speaking of eyebrows, piercing them probably brings more pain to critical observers than I suspect it did to their wearers. Pink was once a color for boys only. Purple was for royalty and black was simply functional.

I'm personally not a fan of tattoos because they are permanent and much of what I loved in 1968 does not define me today, but if other people find them desirable why should it bother me?

It is the same way when people identify as the opposite sex. If they feel they are more one way than another, who are we to argue with them? Personally I would like to see gender labeling replaced by something more honest.

How is it okay to take labels for granted when most of the people I know are not the stereotypical perfect model of any one thing. Ugly can cover a beautiful heart and beauty can cover an abyss of hatefulness. Once you get to know people those monikers don't mean much.

In the long run all this ado about nothing is often only a power play by people whose agendas really have nothing to do with what is happening.

Meetups

We speak the same language, but we don't use the same words.

We both have very good eyes, but we don't see the same things.

Both of us function quite well in this world, but our actions are different, our clothing is different, the ornamentation on our bodies is not similar at all.

Both of us like people, but not the same kind.

Each of us has an active mind, but our thoughts come from different worlds.

Each of us would call the other friend, but that word would mean totally different things.

When we meet up it is like an archeological dig.

Two people unearthing unique specimens immersed in today's society and culture.

Ben's Bridge

I am often fascinated by the names of places. All the Taylorville, Millertown, Brownsvilles are easy to figure out. Someone who founded them, or whose ego had enough money, wanted the name to be part of their legacy, which it surely was. For a while.

Then there is Chicago, named after a Native American word, chicagoua, a native garlic plant that grew around Lake Michigan. Seattle named after Chief Seattle, Malibu that was once called Maliwu, meaning it makes a loud sound, and Niagara from the Iroquoian word for strait.

Our forefathers may have brought forth a new nation, but they used some old names like New York, Boston, and Charleston, after King Charles II.

My family has a few names we all recognize too. Places like Brooke's corner, the intersection where she made a quick and dramatic entrance into this world weighing less than four pounds. Ben's bridge where my son's charge, a young husky, leaped over the bridge and was almost followed by my son who stopped just in the nick of time when he realized it was probably a twenty or thirty foot drop. Ben lived totally unscathed in the way of dogs. And The Big House, a huge old Victorian house that our family called home for five generations.

And then there are the names that seem to make no sense at all like Salt creek which has no salt in it. Maritime names for suburbs in the middle of the Illinois Prairie, And Star Ridge road which doesn't seem to have anything more to do with the stars than any other road in Canton, North Carolina. But maybe they are like Ben's Bridge, a place that once had meaning to a only a few people.

Ode to Irish butter

Death by butter, otherwise known as the toast diet.

Imagine sliding into heaven on a lovely river of Irish butter.

Slipping over the edge on a sunny side up fried egg.

Skidding into hell while taste buds are screaming with joy.

Followed by a chaser of guilt and a sprinkle of remorse.

In the end

Lately there have been times when life moves so quickly, or I move so slowly, that days pass before I realize I have not written a thought.

It is like being at a feast so rich, so varied, so infinitely huge that I have to be careful not to miss my favorite part -- dessert!

I believe I may be entering the very first phase of being old and I say that with both fear and wonder.

As Bestest pointed out, I have appeared too early at two things lately. In my defense I wrote down the wrong time on my calendar, but perhaps that is how it starts. I also went to the wrong place for our Cinco de Mayo celebration, but I was in good company there with my friend, a 29 year old engineer. The oldest and youngest members of our club finally found our way over to others in the end.

I have out lived my license plate! I went to put my new sticker on it only to discover it is peeling off. Now I suppose I shall have to find a way to replace it and the DMV is not open on Mondays.

Sunday was one of those halcyon days when the weather was perfect and I went to watch a new old sport. Old time baseball, a leftover from the transition of Cricket to Baseball where each run in ends by ringing a bell to announce the tally and the players wear old fashioned uniforms with no gloves.  We sat under a tree in the shade and it felt like we might have gone back in time.

The pharmacist refilled my prescription for the third time since I thought it was expired, leaving me with the feeling that I am just biding my time till the end.

My calendar is full. Ironwood Ladies, Wine Women and Words, library, baseball games, lunch with my daughter and granddaughter for Mother's Day, interspersed with calls from Bestest and my youngest son. For the first time in my life I feel like I have found my people. My fear of ending up alone seems unfounded right now. I am living my dream.

I have often felt like odd man, or woman, out. I guess I thought life was supposed to be what you are dealt, that the family and friends surrounding you were it. The truth, I have discovered, is that you are blessed with the opportunity to hunt down and choose your friends and family of the heart.

Suddenly one of my favorite phrases by John Lennon, "Everything will be okay in the end. If it's not okay, it's not the end." causes me to ponder . . .

In the beginning

Almost seventy years ago, I was born.

Now that is an intriguing thing to me, because seventy years before I was born Thomas Edison invented the first version of the light bulb, the atlas bear had just become extinct and Jeanne Calment was four years old. She would become the longest living human being whose lifespan was verified when she died in 1997 at the age of 122 years.

I recently learned that half of the world's animals have become extinct during my lifetime, most since I was twelve years old.

I saw my first television program at three and the first man land on the moon when I was nineteen.

I remember much of my life from the age of two on, but when I was ten my father mentioned that something happened ten years ago and I thought, "Wow, I wonder what it is like to remember something that long ago?'

It was a shock to me when I realized that I graduated from high school fifty two years ago.

So what was it like when I was a child? In some ways it was very much like it is today. From a child's point of view. Except that I was never shuffled off to daycare, or preschool. Kindergarten was even relatively rare in 1955.  My parents moved so that I might attend a public one in Springfield, Illinois.

As a child of a predominantly well to do family I was fortunate to teethe on silver dumbbells and eat my oatmeal out of silver porringers alone in a huge dark dining room. I remember the milk often had wax chunks in it from the cartons it came in. Back then milk was still delivered by a horse drawn wagon and on Easter that horse had a fancy flower covered hat that she was allowed to eat later on.

I learned to ride my tricycle in one big double door of the living room, down a dark scary hallway and into the big double doors on the other end of the living room. My nursery had a wall of windows covered in semi sheer curtains where shadows moved in the moonlight. I hoped they were Santa Claus, or the Easter Bunny and not some evil witch or other terrifying creature from the stories I heard.

And my dreams were vivid from the start! I remember waking up in my little youth bed with the rails half way down to keep me from falling out. There, right in front of me, were silent flames encompassing my whole blanket! I was terrified and wondered why they didn't hurt this time?

Suffering

Everyone knows someone who complains about the suffering some particular thing causes them, but when you make a suggestion on ways to avoid it, or stop it, they avoid you.

Familiarity may breed contempt, but it also makes suffering more comfortable than change.

They entrench themselves in the known events surrounding their discomfort.

It gives them something to talk about and they know how to talk about it, because they've been doing it for ages.

They know what will happen in almost every instance, because they have wallowed in it for a very long time.

Change would involve embracing new ideas and actually doing new things. Change is scary.

The tension headache, the mean boss, the crass coworkers, the abusive children, the chronic suffering of a lifetime also draws attention and pity their way.

It is a way of life, but it could be turned in a different direction. Instead of living to suffer, a person could begin searching out new ways to end the suffering.

It's that old glass half full, half empty thing. Do I spend every day afraid I will not have enough water, or rejoicing in the taste of the water that is there right now?