Amusing Grace

 

People are taught to want the common. 

It is easier for the world if everyone wants superfluous things like geegaws and faddish clothes.

Buying new cars and houses and cruises keeps the fat cats fed and everyone else running on treadmills where they are too busy doing the habitual instead of thinking, or really living.

Joy is defined in columns of dollars and cents, files of positive and negative tests, being different like everyone else.

The ultimate success can be seen as winning a gig on The Voice, a husband on the batchelorette, or a promotion in a tall building.

All things can be won, bought, or collected! The right ones are supposed to make you healthy, wealthy, and wise. But do they?

What if what makes me happy is something else? Finding that something could be the secret to a truly fulfilled life. One where I don't have to be or do what I see on television. 

Striving to be what I am not really only leads to failure. Some people were not cut out to be mothers, or teachers, artists, or race car drivers and all the work in the world will not make them successful at that. Not really. If life makes escaping to work, or sleep, feel good, maybe I am in the wrong place doing the wrong things.

Life shouldn't be years of escapism. Joy comes from immersing myself in what I love. 

Grace is not conforming, or even not conforming. It is finding fulfillment in doing what feels right. Not just looking right.

There are Puritans among us

My journey along the way has been long. As a child I was open and vulnerable. Ready to believe whatever was told me, taking it at face value no matter what, finding security in the grown-ups around me. Exposed to religion in bits and pieces, I put together a strange and sweet story based on love, fear and an agrarian society.

My teen years found me romantically searching for truth among the stories of saints and those extreme religious, like cloistered nuns in hospitals. I wanted ritual and order, safety and absolute security.

After my marriage I was drawn back into the religion of my husband and my father's family. Episcopalians are transitional people. Not quite Catholic and definitely not Baptist. But looking back I think it was mostly belonging. The priest drew us in, gave us places in the church, work to do and he tapped into our neediest desires. That belonging lasted through my child raising years.

And then, just as my boys were starting to question and rebel, the people in our new, tiny, upstart Episcopal church began to bend towards the fanatical. Not the priest, he was and still is a person I love, respect, and admire, but many other upstanding members began to stand above and upon the others. There was a dark, grim, satisfaction in suffering that emanated from them, time honored descendants of a Puritanical society.

I did not belong.

In the end this opened the way for me to explore other religious and spiritual paths and, ultimately, a doctrine of my own based on science and being and meditation. This morning, walking across the acorn strewn grass, stepping over and around huge, long tree roots, feeling the breeze gently blowing through my hair, seeing people in the distance fishing, I felt an overwhelming sense of belonging, of being, of a love that transcends time and space and finds the puritans among us to be mere shadows in the light.

The compression of atoms that define this body in time seems of supreme importance to me, but this is barely a spark in the continuum of time. I am. I was. I will always be.

Whether I am aware, or how I am aware, is irrelevant to 99% of what is, but it is important to me now and I want to make the best of it.

A glance at the past

 

WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 12, 2008

What Do You See?

I have to ask my sister. "What do you see?"
I need to know.
Not that I doubt my own eyes, my own judgment, but I want to see through her eyes.
I want to feel the image pressed against her retina, smell the odor of it within the confines of her receptors.
I want my hand to reach out and feel what she feels and he feels and they feel and you feel.

Right here, among us, the creator constantly works. Everywhere, mountains of creations, worlds of creations, simple, plain, ornate in a million different ways, surround us. Each one, only the same one, made again and again. The medium never changes. The hands work with the same level of skill and the skill never varies. Not one is any more precious than the other, not one looks different in its creator's eyes, like a cook preparing innumerable meatballs for a great feast they are all the same, only these are Faberge meatballs, their value beyond comprehension.

Each one shaped with love and exquisite care. Each one honed and fired and decorated and then, just before letting it go, a thumb presses slightly into the cradled object. One thumbprint, a small indentation for identification. A shallow shadow of a place left to hold all the differences that can be. Almost invisible, it is the only place visible to many of us and it is a shape shifter, a reflecting pond displaying our own selves, not the one before us.

How odd that we judge ourselves so harshly thinking that it is someone else. How strange the conclusions we draw from such a shallow place. How bizzare the levels of resentments and pain that pile upon us from something so immaterial, so miniscule and fleetingly fragile. How often do we crack the object during our perusal, imagining a tiny little flaw the creator deemed a signature? This ever changing flicker of uniqueness becomes the visage blocking our view and we spend our entire lives seeking what we are.

And so I ask my sister, "What do you see?" Thinking that perhaps I should stir the soup one more time, this time with my eyes closed so that I may immerse myself in us.

Stifled?

Society is built around customs and conventions. We grow up thinking that the things we learn and do are the right way.

Different is always dangerous because the average person is afraid of it. They don't recognize it immediately, nor do they trust it, but change is part of growth and customs are often just arbitrary things that caught on over time.

Holding a fork and knife a certain way changes depending upon where you live, but as long as the nutrients reach your mouth, nature doesn't care. I care, but that is only my preference. The same goes for styles and colors of clothing. Wearing white after Labor Day was once a great faux pas. That doesn't hold true for everyone anymore. Faux pas are like other customs. They change.

Kitchens were once separate houses, or rooms, behind the house because of heat and fire dangers. Then they were separate rooms closed off from the rest of the house so guests would not see the clutter, but now most of us cannot afford hired kitchen help, so kitchens are part of the living room, or great room.

We transitioned from teepees and cabins to houses, to McMansions, and now some people have gone full circle back to tiny houses. Our need to distinguish ourselves by building bigger anthills has diminished somewhat. We are building homes we find comfortable and not necessarily museums.

Although a home is a museum of sorts. It's the place to display our personality. The key word being OUR. Daring to live and decorate and dress ourselves in ways pleasing to us takes courage. Honestly, there really aren't any absolute rules for living besides being safe and healthy. Buying a book written by someone who is supposed to really know the etiquette for all of life mostly benefits the author.

Stifling creativity for the sake of so called etiquette is lazy. 

That being said, I don't want to see the food in your mouth, or be subjected to your noise unless we agree to share it. Those are some of my personality quirks. 

Balance is tricky.

To the moon

 

I  have occasionally thought about the fact that I am separated from one of my children and, as painful as this was for a while, it has become acceptable now. All my life I have had to separate from those I cared about. 

Our family moved frequently while I was between eleven and seventeen and even if it was only across town a few miles, the new school meant never seeing my old friends again. Looking back I don't understand why my mother didn't find ways for me to maintain those relationships, but she did not and it never occurred to me that I could. Today a ten minute drive to a friend's house is nothing. Back then it was like going to the moon.

I am watching Star Trek Voyager and one of the characters becomes the caretakers for some children who eventually must go back to their biological families. Each time this happens my heart sinks and I feel a deep sadness for her. It didn't occur to me right away that I have had similar experiences.

Foster children are not ours to keep. Other children may move on as adults. People divorce, die, move onto new relationships in other states, there are infinite ways to say good-bye.

Learning to adapt was a necessary part of my maturation process. It might be a little easier for me than it is for some people. I am a naturally hopeful person. I tend to discover the best in most situations. I am malleable and resourceful. I can protect myself by expecting the worst, but that never lasts longer than it takes to find some glimmer of a reprieve.

And for that I am truly glad.

Mind does matter

 

I belong to a Facebook group that shows pictures of our town long ago. Sometimes I look at them and feel a sense of longing that seems out of place.

Born just before 1950, my generation was a transitional one. All generations are to some extent, but mine saw horse drawn milk wagons, tiny mom and pop stores, hot summers without air conditioning and our first forays into space.

Houses still had functional porches surrounded by towering trees to keep things cool. They had big windows and lots of doors for light and breezes and access to outside places to work in hot weather. Garages were still huge, leftovers from when they had been barns and many large houses still took up a quarter of a block of land.

Coal furnaces had to be stoked and piles of coal were delivered through chutes into brick basements that often had dirt floors. Electric chandeliers were often converted gas lamps attached to ten foot ceilings and clothes were washed in old wringer washers dragged into the kitchen on wash day. Later they were dried on clothes lines propped up with long wooden poles.

Families had one radio that people gathered round like we do televisions today and one car, so walking was the most common form of transportation. We still got smallpox vaccinations and polio shots came out, but not before many children were living in iron lungs.

I jumped rope, played jacks, roller skated and rode my bicycle to my neighbor's house where we dragged her toy kitchen out onto the front porch to play. Dogs were not penned up, or tied out, so there were packs of them running, even on the school playground. I was afraid of dogs.

But I had a dog! He was a Scottish terrier, Snorkel, that my father brought home. He followed me everywhere until one night some children happened on him eating on a meaty bone and he bit them. I don't know why, but he was put down after that.

It was a time of innocence. We were all bathed together, played together, fed the wild squirrel bread from our hands and polished silver on the picnic table with a bunch of friends. My girl friend and I pierced our hands with a safety pin and become blood sisters. I had a squirrel tail hanging on the handlebars of my bike and a rabbit's foot in my pocket. We were little savages, but so was everyone else.

During the course of my childhood I had pet rabbits, ducks, fish, frogs, a parrot and monkeys. Once we even had a tiny alligator, but my mother returned him to the store because he preferred his meat rotten and saved it in his little pond.

So many of the things we believed, did and hoped for are no longer safe, politically correct, or even imaginable now. Looking back at it I sometimes feel closer to the world of my grandfather than my grandchildren, but that is the way of the world.

Youth is best defined by its ability to change. The wisdom of old age is mitigated by the amount the mind has atrophied.

Memory Album

 

I found a realtor's ad for the house I lived in from kindergarten through eleventh grade, minus two years in the middle. My grandfather bought it and rented it to my parents so I could go to kindergarten when kindergarten was a rather rare commodity in schools at that time. 

Walking through those pictures sparked a lifetime of memories! There was the corner of the yard that used to have bushes with a path through them. I ran through it on the way home from school on days when I had piano lessons and one day I tripped. I fell so hard it knocked the wind out of me. And there was the sidewalk where I would ride my wagon by putting one knee in it and pushing with the other leg to zoom down the side of the house, or ride my bike and see how I low I could go while turning the corner, before I fell one day and took layers off my knee.

Inside was the mail slot into our foyer with the big glass door to keep the chill out of the house. To the left was the living room and I could still see the baby grand piano in the corner that used to hold our giant Christmas tree, wired into the woodwork so four little ones couldn't knock it over. I could see the windows I had peered out of when my mother went out to build a snowman for us since we were too sick to go out ourselves. There was the wall where our aquarium sat, right by the big television set that had converter boxes and rotator boxes on top so we could watch one of three channels.

The sun porch was painted white, but the bookcases were still there from when my father had his office upstairs. The dining room where we ate every dinner and celebrated birthdays and holdidays had different light fixtures, but I could see where the buffet with it's huge mirror had been. My mother hid a brush in one of the drawers so she could do our hair before we left for school.

The kitchen was much different, but there were the windows our neighbor passed in a trouble light through one night when the power was off. I remember sticking my finger in the empty socket as I pulled it in and getting shocked. Under them was the space where our kitchen table sat. We each had our place. My youngest brother sat at the end on a step stool type chair and sometimes the toast would fly out the end of the toaster and slide all the way down to him! I also remembered where the high chair was and the trash can next to it where one of my brothers threw away a match when he got caught playing with fire. My mother was a hero that day, kicking the burning trash can down the steps and out the back door and ripping the curtains off the wall before the firemen came.

The basement still had the room that was once my dad's office when he was a high school teacher grading papers, and the old enamel brick shower we sometimes used in the summer. Even the toilet on its dais was still here, right in the middle of the laundry room!

I could see the second floor bathroom, pretty much the same as it had been, but no longer pink tiled. And I could see into all four upstairs bedrooms, three of which were mine at different times in my life. Each room full of memories from that age when I slept there. The bedspread decorated with dolls from many lands when I was young, the day bed room with the bright green furniture my mother thought a young teen would love, and finally the deep orange painted room of a young girl in high school with her Nasa clock and so many dreams.

I remember sleeping on brush curlers, using Ten O Six on my face, getting ready for dates and standing there looking at myself in my dresser mirror thinking, this is me?

So many memories waiting in those pictures, it felt like a time machine.

Sunshine

After dealing with problems for two days I was very relieved to have things solved, so I decided to paint something.

I've been picturing some kind of ocean with the sun coming up, or setting behind it, but my skill is such that I never really know how my paintings will turn out. I mentally divided my canvas into three sections and began with my favorite color, cerulean blue. Then I used some deep purple, another color I really love and finally, because suns are typically yellow, I used that for the top. By this time I was getting into it and adding some red highlights to the sun seemed like a good idea. 

As usual I found myself drawn into the process and when I looked up it had been almost two hours, which isn't long for a painting. I usually start like this then leave it for a few days while I just kind of stare at it until I am ready to do more. Sometimes I share it with Bestest or my youngest son and sometimes they make a suggestion. This time Bestest really loved it!

He liked it so much he called me to see if I actually painted it and then told me it was beautiful! He's never done that before and it really made me feel good. In fact, it kind of changed everything. 

Now there is a possibility that someone is going to buy this painting! I would gladly just give it to them, but the thought that they want to pay for it astounds me. I like it. I sit and look at it sometimes, but I honestly don't know what is so different about this painting. Still, the whole experience has been joyful and uplifting. It's like the sunshine in that painting spilled over into my life.

Frustration

I am having to rollover a beneficiary 401K to an IRA.  At least I think that is what I am doing! I have an accountant who has taken care of things like this for me since 1998, but State Farm has decided to make things difficult.

Suddenly the paperwork is not enough. They sent me a vague letter saying I needed to call them, but when I did, the woman wasn't really sure why I was calling. Since I didn't know either, it was a problem. I took the letter to my accountant, but State Farm would not allow her to speak on my behalf.

Armed with information she gave me, I called them back.

Now every time I call I have to go through a text message to prove I am who I am because I have never been able to get their pin number to work on my online account. And every time I called today I got a different person who had a different problem with what was going on. I ended up calling back and forth between my accountant and State Farm's benefits people for first one thing and then another. 

I was finally able to give them the name of the process that satisfied them, the account number for the new IRA, the name of the new company and a name to put on the check they insist must be sent straight to me. But . . . the name of the new company was too long! It would not fit on their check! I asked couldn't they just abbreviate the less important words? Couldn't they just use the name of the company, Putman Fiduciary Trust Company? Couldn't they look at the detailed paperwork that company had sent them to facilitate all of this to begin with? Nope! They needed me to call back with a shorter name that would fit on their check!

I called around and had a name for them, but when I called back I had used up my day's worth of allotted texts for my pin number and they could not accept my call! A woman offered to help me update my pin, which I have been unable to make work for years. She said it was simple. Forty minutes later she gave up too and decided she would pass me on to a 401K representative. (I might mention here that during the course of the morning I had been shuffled from one kind of representative to another, each one ostensibly the ONLY one who could help me. In between I was placed on very long holds waiting for my call to be the next one in line.)

All I needed to do was give him the short name they could type on the check they were going to send me, but he can't do that for 24 hours since I used up all the text messages they allowed.

Tomorrow at 12:35 PM I am hoping to call back, get the right representative, and have them type Putman Investments on a check that will be mailed to me. It sounds simple, but I have nearly four hours of phone calls that say it won't be that easy.