Not taking the bait

There are people who seem to need to wander in and out of multiple relationships all their lives. Many times overlapping one with another and leaving everyone sad, except maybe the one doing the wandering.

I wonder.

Is it the game of not getting caught that makes it exciting.

Or the feeling of being able to have more people you think adore you?

Or the never ending need to fill a void that can't be filled?

Is it the thrill of cheating? And if it is, does that dim when there is no one to cheat on? Or do you have to create enough situations so that it feels like you're cheating?

What makes a person throw away good relationships for fly by night ones? Especially when one of the perks of a so called "Good" relationship is that the other person will often let you use them to satisfy your narcissistic personality.

Whatever the answers for all these are, I am forever grateful not to be involved in any of this anymore. Tonight I needed to ask a question and the answer, after twenty years, was still calculated to try and make me feel less than. But I'm smarter now. I can't be hooked anymore. I give that honor to all the other fish in the sea, too naïve or too free to care.

On aging

Growing up I was close to a lot of grown-ups, but very few ever confided their personal challenges with me, so although I knew my grandma and my great aunts, I never really knew how they felt about their lives. I might have had a better idea if my godmother had been able to come spend the three days by the pool visiting with me that we planned, but she died the day she was supposed to come. My mother died at 58 before I really thought about asking her the questions I would like to ask now. And even if I had, she didn't live long enough to experience some of them.

Like me, all these people were active in both their personal lives and community. They worked, played, volunteered and socialized. I come from a family where many of the people seem to grow old slower than other people.

We are not laid back easy going people, which can make us challenging to be around. We are passionate, all engines go people with good intentions and good hearts. Whatever those passions happen to be can make us difficult, but I believe they also keep us energetic and going.

But now, as I approach my seventieth birthday, I wish I could sit down with them and talk to them about how they felt at this age. Did it feel like they were approaching another mile marker? I have never really felt anything much as I transitioned from teens to twenties. I was not traumatized by turning thirty or forty. I was always too busy with life to care what the calendar said. Fifty was harder because I had just gotten divorced and was in uncharted territory and sixty was frightening because my new best friend was thirty years younger than me, but those all turned out better than good.

Now I'm a little concerned. I still feel good. I went out and hit tennis balls today. I get together with friends to play trivia, go to movies, play games, etc. I volunteer at the school and am considering another volunteer position for this winter. I'm going to Alabama to walk my friend's dog while he's in Italy and I even do a little book editing for Bestest. But I have to go to the doctor to refill my blood pressure medicine this month and I am afraid, because doctors are downers. It is their job to look for what is wrong with me instead of celebrating what is right and I know once I get sucked down that tube I will age quickly.

I think I would prefer to die a few years earlier than live forever dealing with medical problems. Long term suffering is not my idea of being productive or happy, but I wish I could count on the medical profession to guarantee they would keep me from suffering unduly and let me exit with dignity.

Once upon a time

I have been watching a show on Netflix about the Russian Tsars from Peter the Great on and it occurs to me that they often define the once upon a time we see in fairy tales.

Bigger than life. Homes that are unrivaled in excess details.

Seemingly unparalleled love stories with religious drama, political drama, peasant uprisings, wars at sea and on land. Fighting Napoleon - - you name it they had it.

And most of them were aware that if they wanted to maintain the once upon a time lifestyle of the rich and famous it required serfs.

For every Snow White who returned to a castle, hundreds of people had to live a life of endless labor and squalor. Dwarfs were not singing down in the mines and they did not come home squeaky clean. Instead they more than likely came home with black lung. Sleeping for a hundred years probably sounded like heaven to parents who were burying most of their children before their fifth birthday and watching the others grow bent by rickets, TB and other diseases of the faulty lifestyle imposed by poverty. Dropping them off in the woods to fend for themselves might have been their best bet.

It is easy for people who have everything, to take the rest of the world for granted. Andrew Carnegie once said, "The man who dies rich dies disgraced." He believed the wealthy had a debt to society. There are still people who feel this way: Jimmy Carter, Bill Gates, Oprah Winfrey and some others, but that is not the trend, nor the way of most of America's wealthy. They feel entitled even if they just inherited that money and they will do whatever it takes to keep it, all of it, and more if they can get it.

As the gulf between the rich and the rest of us widens, people become frustrated and angry.They look for the whys and wherefores they can understand and that is when the fairy tale turns ugly. Instead of Bolsheviks we have White Nationalists and KKK and other groups setting out to try and change things their way. Hate becomes a religion.

There really is no happily ever after in a fairy tale. It is only a tale of delayed repercussions.

Memories

I am always surprised at the way people remember. Most of them seem to remember whatever is popular in this moment, or how they would have liked things to be.

They remember themselves as engaged, thoughtful parents even if they were simply parents who occupied a space in the room.

They produce memories to validate what they need in this moment more often than what really occurred.

It is as if a Hallmark movie revised and edited their life, replacing all the mundane truths and sad omissions with once upon a times.

What they forget is the real once upon a times included evil witches, dark fairies, and scary adventures overcome by acts of bravery, intuition, and action.

It isn't the king simply doing his job that changes the story. It is the king getting down off his throne and going to school to find out what he can do to facilitate the prince's education, then doing it. Three simple things that require his time, his courage, his action and his patience, then his long suffering perseverance to see it through. These are not easy things to do in a world that worships power and money, Disneyland and beaches, over the future of one struggling child.

In the end it does not matter how something is remembered, because, good or bad, the echoes of the truth become the foundation of the future.

Backseat babies

Two more children died because a parent forgot they were in the car.

All the ways they suggest people prevent this, leave one shoe in the back seat, etc. are not really going to work, because most people don't believe they could ever forget their child and it is too much trouble to take off shoes every time. It is the time you are in a rush and too busy that it is most likely to happen.

We need something like the seatbelt reminders. Something that cannot be ignored.

Perhaps an alarm that goes off when you open the front door if there is weight in the back seat. Then your driver door would lock open until you opened the back door.

It would be a bit of a hassle, but people would adapt and maybe one more child would not be baked alive in his parent's car.

Bridges

"When you're weary, feeling small . . ." Paul Simon says it best.

Everyone needs bridges to get them through life.

Actually, most of us need several because it is just too much for one person.

Sometimes we need a sweet little curved wooden one arching over those bubbling streams other folk like to wade into,

And sometimes we need a huge metal one over the lava pits to hell that are becoming more and more common in today's world.

I have a whole repertoire of bridges: writing, poetry, music, persistence, to supplement Bestest and my son who are my most reliable.

They are what make life bearable.

Change

In the past I lived with things because I didn't know how to change them, or was afraid to change them, or they just weren't that important to me.

None of those things are true anymore.

I am too old to live with things that are toxic to me.

I know how to change things. Maybe not on a national scale, or even a neighborhood scale, but on a personal one.

I am not afraid to do what is right for me. I am nearly seventy years old and if I don't take care of me I will find myself in the hands of people who might not have my best interests at heart. That is unacceptable.

I have narrowed my life down to the things I value the most and those things are all important to me.

In fifty years

It is always possible to find someone who will tell you what you want to hear.

That has nothing to do with the truth. Propaganda is not truth no matter how delightful it might sound to your ears.

Truth will be echoed throughout history as it always has.

Truth cannot be manipulated, or twisted, or limited to one news station, because then it is not truth.

Fifty years from now you will be able to look back and see the truth the same way we do the Civil War, Nazi Germany, Nero's empire and all the other travesties people have participated in throughout time.

There will be new Anne Franks, probably Hispanic this time, writing about the atrocities they were subjected to by a righteous government.

There will be new Harriet Tubman's trying to save hard working, innocent people.

There will be new Martin Luther Kings leading people to do the right thing in spite of  how unpopular he is with a lot of supposedly good people.

And there will be you, because it is harder to hide now that the world is so much more visible.

My Vicarious Life

My life is so full of contrasts.

My son calls me as he drives home from work, or when he runs the mountains of North Carolina with his Blue Merle Louisiana Catahoula Leopard rescue dog, Zola.

Bestest calls me from England where he is at the Bodleian library. That is where my favorite series of books centers around. Now I find they are making a new movie about them there.

He goes to Shakespearean plays in London and beautiful gardens in the countryside.  He takes a group of students to see Spider-Man and speaks of riding trains, tubes, buses, even planes as he flies to Amsterdam for the weekend to visit friends.

My old coworker used to tell me tales of her vacations hobnobbing with the rich and famous all over the world.

Friends write or call to talk of all sorts of interesting and valuable things they are doing to make this world a better place.

I ponder the best place to buy super strong mega rolls of toilet paper. I boil eggs for snacks and try out different premade salads. On a really good day I go to a band concert in a local park with my granddaughter.

And "I get by with a little help from my friends."

Wonder

When I was a child I believed as a child, but now that I'm an adult?

I still feel childish wonder. I just don't attribute it to magic anymore.

The magic of the past became the science of today and I am confident that will continue into the future.

There is an amazing amount of wonder in this world and none of it is minimized by the truth.

The fact that a tiny egg gets together with a tiny sperm and creates such a complicated and miraculous creature as a human being is more than amazing in and of itself. We don't need mythology to make it better.

Whatever power created creation is much larger than I can even begin to contemplate, but I'm pretty sure it wasn't some bored artist playing in the dirt and I don't like the idea of minimizing this power by giving it human traits.

I plan on just enjoying the trip and doing the best I can to make it better for anyone I can.

Faith

I am always hearing that people's dreams reflect their life and what is going on in their life. Sometimes I can see that in my dreams.

Sometimes I can't.

Last night I dreamed I was an eight year old girl living up in the mountains with my mama and papa. I had two sisters and the lady down the mountain had one son. She'd often say about him, "He's underwater agin, meditatin'." I could picture him lying down near the murky bottom of a pond among the water plants, hands folded on his stomach.

But as for me and my house? Mama kept rattlesnakes. She said they wouldn't hurt nobody if we was good. Papa walked gingerly over them, but I know he didn't think Mama was right. I was scared of them. Scared they'd come at me from under the old chest by the door, or be hiding under the bed when I cleaned the floor. I tried to have faith, but having faith that something will go against its nature felt foolish to me.

Born right

There is so much goodness in this world, but I am always saddened and shocked by how much of it does not come from people who think they are so wonderful.

They live in nice houses, take care of their children, choose their charities, love their grandchildren.

And turn their faces from the poorest of the poor. Those people without food to eat, medicine for their children and who do not even have a country that is safe to live in.

We are only protecting what is ours though. If someone has to suffer it should not be us, or our children because . . .

Because?

We were born in the right country.

Let's hope that doesn't change in our children's lifetime.

Or our grandchildren's.

Handy man

I always wondered why men could fix things and women couldn't. I mean I was pretty sure it wasn't part of their genetic makeup, because where would that come from? After millions of years repairing his spear, caveman is now genetically programmed to fix automobiles?

Nope, made no sense to me.

Then I figured it out.

You tube! And before that, How To Manuals.

Today I repaired the broken hatchback door on my car after watching a video about how to do it.

When I assemble furniture? I follow directions. Sometimes two or three times, but I just keep on until it looks like whatever it's supposed to be, a chair, a bookcase, a bed.

It's a little harder when it's the computer, because how do I look up something when the something I need to use to fix it is broken? Mostly I just plug and unplug and, mostly, it works.

Now all this being said. If you have a man handy (or any willing person) why not use him (or her?) It is much easier to watch somebody else work than to do it yourself.

At least most of the time.

Two or more

I don't mind going places with one other person. That can be more fun than going alone.

After that my enthusiasm diminishes exponentially for every person that is added.

Moving from two to three people can make it as much as four times less fun. Four or more just make it a trial unless each person is willing to simply show up and be responsible for themselves.

The more people that are included, the more problems that arise. When do we go? Where do we meet? What do we eat? When do we leave? And on and on and on. Half the conversation centers on mundane things no one could possibly be interested in and yet seem necessary.

One on one we can have a meaningful conversation in any way that suites us. We can make decisions on a dime. The occasion is personal and wonderful.

My meetup group is one of the rare things I don't mind doing with a bunch of people, because whether or not you come is totally up to you. The group simply presents a situation. You come or you don't. No one has to be picked up. No one has to be waited for and taken home. No one else can extend your stay unless you choose to allow them to do that. It is one of the few groups I know that feels unentangled, independent and infinitely fascinating.

My need for company is not strong enough for me to stretch much beyond that.

Lovely

I have fallen in love with the word, lovely.

It is light and airy and full of sunshine.

The deep, rich, fairy tale sunshine of a late afternoon when anything could happen and the world has a magical look.

The shadowy fern framed morning sunshine on a screened in porch that is cool and serene.

Lovely is both lilting and exotic, an understated sound that is so English. Speaking to me of old forests, quiet streams, and tunnels of greenery sprinkled with cottage flowers.

Bestest sprinkles it through our conversations and I am transported far across the sea now when I hear it.

Don't fence me in

People see what they want to see, what they expect to see and perhaps even more importantly, people do not see what they choose not too. Whether that choice is conscious or unconscious, human beings have an amazing ability not to see things that are counter to what they want to believe is true.

Limiting ourselves to particular news organizations, religious indoctrination, and regional beliefs; permitting only particular organizations to tell us what they want us to hear, keeping outside sources at arms length, limits our abilities to see the truth.

People claim they want truth, but usually what they mean is they want the truth as it lies within their personal belief system. Cross that line and they come up with all sorts of excuses for why that is not a good thing.

Different cultures have different lines and that is where mistrust, wars, bigotry, prejudice and misinformation comes from. People within every government, race, religion, ethnicity, whatever, have people whose job it is to convince them theirs is the best. The right one! The favorite.

It is a story of immaturity, of children vying for their parent's favor, of school yard bullying. It is nature's version of territorial rights. It is looking at the world through narrow parameters that eliminate all sights not acceptable and crushing all experiences into a form that fits a particular story.

Near death experiences translate the act of a brain disengaging into something people can articulate. We are a wondrous creation and our bodies can make sense of almost anything in some way that our culture has told us is possible.

If we need comfort badly enough our body can even provide that in some cases. Multiple personalities, supernatural creatures, wish fulfillment, call it what you like, it comes from within.

We are truly wondrous creatures who seldom know how, or chose, to use all of our gifts for goodness. Instead we limit ourselves to the things people invent to fence us in and inculcate us with from the day we are born. And, unfortunately, sometimes we even validate our less than good characteristics by justifying them according to whether they lie inside or outside that fence.

Goodbye

I remember when we met. May 17, 1968.

I was infatuated, but we had to say goodbye the next weekend. He graduated and I had to go home for the summer.

I don't remember all the days we were together over the years, but I do remember the goodbyes. Each one was painful in its own way for its own reason.

At first it was just goodbye for a week or two. After all we had just met and we lived two hours apart.

But then it was goodbye for six weeks. Basic training seemed like forever. We wrote every day and I managed to put together a crazy round about way to be there for graduation. We were only together for a few hours before it was goodbye again and this time I was afraid it would be forever.

But it wasn't. Months passed and we were granted a month together. At the end of that month I rode with him to a mall where my parents picked me up to take me home and he got into a car filled with uniformed soldiers to leave for Vietnam. I remember looking out the back window of the car, watching his car, thinking I might never see him alive again. There was a war going on and I was surprised to find tears rolling down my cheeks seemingly of their own accord. It was the most desolating goodbye of my life.

The ache of young lovers feels unbearable, but it is not. That's why they say all things are bearable with love. He did come back. For his father's funeral, but only for a month and it was goodbye again. I was beginning to hate airports.

Short timers are often at risk and the days before our wedding were filled with apprehension. It was pointless. We were married and you would think that would be the end of the goodbyes.

Only it wasn't. Now there were even more painful and foreboding and sad goodbyes to face. The third one turned out to be forever.

Jarring. Surreal. But it was good.

Sometimes goodbye is the best thing that can happen between two people. It doesn't make it easy. It's not supposed to be easy. Forever is a long time.

Through the years all those goodbyes gave me a bit of wisdom. I knew I was strong. I knew life went on even when I was sad and I knew that eventually something even better would most likely come along.

And it did.

Ghosts and dictators and pie, oh my

My nightmares are worse than ever, but my other dreams were preposterous and comical last night.

I am in the house where I have often had precognitive dreams of family deaths as well as mundane dreams from simply growing up there. It is night time and my mother and sister decide to sleep in the living room on the only furniture in there,  two couches. I could sleep in there, but there is another couch in the room attached to it, so I go out there.  I am covered up and it is pitch black when I begin feeling something crowding down on me. After trying to tell myself it is only my imagination I panic and call for help from my mother and sister. They don't seem to hear me. Maybe they are too sound asleep, so I try calling louder even though it might make whatever is surrounding me worse. Finally I shriek as loud as I can, "Help me!" I wake up, confused, still afraid and then worried that my neighbors heard.

Next dream I find myself passing a big red shiny bus on my way to work. When I get to work there is Trump lolling in my chair at my desk. He is very suave, like a fox, presenting his "deal" to me and asking me to sign off on it, but I won't and my coworker is afraid for me. She says I am making a big mistake.

I am outside the work building and see Trump picking up his three year old son from nursery school. The little boy is so excited. He runs and leaps into his daddy's arms. Trump hugs him and plays with him and I am quite taken with this side of him. I follow him into the preschool where I work. It is huge, like a mall, very posh and modern with tall dark metal stairways and bright light cubicle rooms. Trump goes into one of the rooms and comes out wearing dress up clothes and earrings and riding a pogo stick. He is followed by some children also dressed up and playing. One little girl is riding a seven foot tall ostrich decked out in black feathers and wooden two by four legs. I try to put on some red macaw earrings, but when Trump looks at me and raises his eyebrows I drop the back and cannot find it in the mess of toys below my feet.

They head off through the dark hallway and go up to a door at the very top of the stairs. The little girl on the ostrich barely fits through the door. I continue to follow them because it is almost snack time and I want a piece of the pie.

I'll see you in my dreams

Sometimes dreams are better than being awake.

I found myself sleeping on the bottom floor of a stone turret in a Disneyland type castle. The room was round with stone walls, elegant velvet hangings and a modern wooden door that had a venetian blind covered window in it's top half.

I knew I was in the guest quarters of my best friend's mother's castle and that she was probably just getting up to fly into her kitchen and make breakfast.

I was just too tired to even open my eyes and as mortified as I felt about that, I was grateful my door was locked and no one could come in to catch me sleeping in.

But then! I heard the door unlock! Footsteps crossed my room and I felt the dip in the mattress as someone climbed up on the bed then crawled across to the other side near my bear, Bearnard. I knew it was my friend and, no longer mortified, I was just so unbelievably happy.

I was still too tired to open my eyes, but just knowing my friend was there warmed my heart to the very core. I lay there for a while luxuriating in that until it slowly dawned on me that there wasn't room for anyone on that side of my bed except for Bearnard. Not wanting to lose that moment I replayed the moment I felt the bed move over and over until I moved to reach out to hug . . .

I woke up. Not sad that the moment was gone, but still feeling the joy when I thought it was real.

Maybe it was.

Good Person

I think a good person is best described by this quote by the Dalai Lama when he speaks of a good life.

“Whether you believe in God or not does not matter so much, whether you believe in Buddha or not does not matter so much; as a Buddhist, whether you believe in reincarnation or not does not matter so much. You must lead a good life. And a good life does not mean just good food, good clothes, good shelter. These are not sufficient. A good motivation is what is needed: compassion, without dogmatism, without complicated philosophy; just understanding that others are human brothers and sisters and respecting their rights and human dignity.” 

When a good person is told by innumerable sources that children are suffering. They do not ask if they are immigrant children and they do not make excuses for that suffering.

Dream work

Mexican farmers working the fields, mining in tiny shafts underground, until the ground collapses and they are buried, trapped, lost under the red clay and mud. A man opens a door at the top of a staircase and looks down at them. He throws a dead body down and just before it flies into the muck below he attaches an almost dead body to it, then slams the door.

I am horrified and fight to get into that door only to find my teenage son and his friend there in foster care. The friend has a horrible disease. Cysts and lumps cover his once perfect body and I try to reach him to get him away. My son looks at me and says, "Linda, it's too late."

Now I sit across a table from them. Wondering how things got this bad?

But huge tanks rumble over us and the world shakes.

I wake up depressed, feeling trapped.

Round and round

I don't know why some things are easier at one time and not others.

When I am in a certain frame of mind, eating healthy is not hard for me. In fact, I am drawn to the avocados, onions, feta cheese, bleu cheese and broccoli. Add romaine and it is both filling and good for me.

The only things I miss are breads, bagels, good biscuits and strawberry ice cream.

But for some reason I go through periods where even they are not totally necessary and those are the times I get my blood sugar under control and even lose weight. It has become almost a cycle for me.

Eighteen months eating good. Twelve months binging on bread and sweets. No amount of reasoning seems to break this.

Throw in a half hour of walking every day and my body thanks me.

My brain, on the other hand, rebels, so I need to find different places to take it and distract it if I expect to continue walking.

A healthy mind in a healthy body. I'm more than halfway there right now. This is the start of the good months.

Again.