One moment in time

 

I had just finished eating brunch today when I was suddenly transported back to a moment in 1954.

The sky was bright blue. Huge cumulus clouds floated above the rough wooden limbs and masses of green leaves creating the dappled shade around the side porch. I was at my Grandma's and Aunt Lete's and someone was fixing breakfast in the big kitchen off this porch.

I could smell the bacon and other smells so tantalizing I longed to go in and join everyone inside. I knew my grandma would be there, apron tied around her tiny waist and my aunt, more amply endowed, would be by the stove wielding a spatula with a red wooden handle.

The huge old table with the legs painted with flowers would be set with Fiesta ware, not the new fakes, but the original ones in bright yellow, orange, green and deep blues. The squat sugar and creamer would be on the table and my chair, a pink painted tin contraption with a footrest to lift me up would be on the side by the windows. My Micky mouse spoon would be beside my plate even if I didn't use it and when I went to sit down, grandma would tie a huge white cotton tea towel around my neck.

All these things meant it wouldn't just be me eating. If that were the case I would have a well used dark metal cookie sheet in front of me to catch all the crumbs from my jelly toast. At big breakfasts, my uncles and aunts would be there holding babies whose feet I would tickle and making a big deal out of everything I did.

I was the much loved and slightly spoiled first grandchild, older by two years than all the rest and seven years younger than my youngest uncle. Life was good. If a jet broke the sound barrier we all would run outside to look for the white trails in the sky. It was a world of sunshine and bacon. The wars were over. The upstairs had been turned into apartments and my grandfather had been dead for nearly four years. The family was recovering.

I took his gathering of nine grown-ups and several babies all around me for granted. Four year olds do not distinguish between people born into a family and those married into it. Back then there was no divorce. There was only life, birth marriage and death. This was my family.

It was probably the happiest most secure time in my entire life and parts of it still waft back over me in lovely moments evoked by sunshine or the smell of bacon frying on lazy mornings.

Ready for what

 

Imagine growing up in a large, relatively sheltered family.

You move a lot, go to a lot of different schools, live in different neighborhoods and towns, but you are always surrounded by people you love and trust.

The advantage of close siblings is always having someone to take a bath with, ride a bike with, play dolls with, even fight with. Your existence is pretty normal and the moving only means more opportunities to meet different people and experience different places.

Then you meet someone outside the family who seems like the most wonderful, incredible person in the world. They grew up in a family that seems very similar to yours in values, but the siblings are sixteen years apart, so they had none of the bonding you took for granted.

You date, are engaged, eventually marry and life couldn't be better. Well, you did have this one dream right at the beginning that you were at a black mass and this person was the anti-priest. It was so vivid and scary, but everyone with big imaginations has bad dreams, especially you, so you pretty much forget all about that.

For the next two or three years life is almost too beautiful to be true. You do everything together. You take the same classes, ride bicycles together, head up a youth group at church, play tennis, and backgammon and chess and things couldn't be better.

Except that the other person starts wanting to go out alone to take pictures. You feel like something is off, but he says it is you. You don't want to allow him any alone time. You decide he must be right, but it was the sudden changes that made it feel off.

Life moves on, you have children, some by adoption, some by birth and life couldn't be any better, except that there is this nagging feeling that something is not right. He says you are worried about nothing, it is all in your mind. All men go on business trips without their families, work late a lot, have clubs and interests that do not include their wives or children. You think that is probably true, it must be you that has the problem.

You have a good life, there is enough money, but it seems like the other people you hang out with have more money and there always seems to be more money when he wants to do something than when you or the children do. He says you waste money and you think he must be right.

You are the family everyone admires. They think you are the most involved in church and school and all kinds of extracurricular activities, but there is always a tension, a sense that all is not right. You are sure everyone believes it is your problem.

Three times he packs up and moves out most of his things without you realizing it and tells you only the night before that he is leaving you. He convinces you that it is your fault.

But the third time, you file for divorce and that is when you discover all those feelings you had were valid. There really was more money than you knew. There really were other women. There actually were reasons he didn't want you to go with him. You were not crazy, or paranoid, or bad at managing money. In fact, you did pretty darn good with what you had.

He spends the next twenty years doing the same things to another woman, who doesn't have children and doesn't believe everything is her fault. She eventually divorces him and moves on.

Your life is better than you could ever have imagined it now. Except that after thirty some years of having the wool pulled over your eyes and being manipulated, you are slightly damaged. You don't always trust your own judgement. You have trouble believing anyone really loves you or values you for yourself. 

And now, twenty years later and thanks to the company of one bestest friend who has stuck with you for twelve of those years, you are starting to feel better -- like maybe you are ready to trust and love and believe in yourself again.

You are ready for something. I wonder what it is.

Immortality

 

 Sadly, or maybe not, there is no formula for immortality. At least not beyond science fiction and even that seems to imply there will be a price to pay if we achieve it. I don't want to be old and infirm. Nobody does, but each way of avoiding that is highly personal. Of course the easiest and least desirable way is to die young.

Other than that we are faced with a million choices. How much and what to eat. How often and how hard to exercise. Whether to exercise by day to day working, like housework, farming, etc, or go to a gym and jump on the human hamster wheel. The options for most middle class Americans are endless. My options are limited by iffy feet and ankles.

I love to eat. I don't mean I just enjoy food. I actually love, love, love, the act, taste, and heavenly experiences of food in my mouth, on my tongue, drifting through my brain. I dream of food. I am like a dog, if I see food I feel the desire and need to consume it all.

That used to embarrass me. I gain weight easily and so I have tried just about every diet there is from reasonable things like the Mediterranean diet, to less savory things like Atkins and Keto. None of those work for me due to things like food preferences, gout and diabetes. Salads are too much work and too little satisfying for me to live with them long term. Maybe if I had a live in cook, I might be able to stick with them, but I seriously doubt it.

I like comfort food. I'm 72 years old. I deserve comfort food, but honestly? I have always craved it. As a child in elementary school I loved a story where the pioneer woman served big hunks of crusty bread and butter with thick beef stew. Even then I dreamed of it. There are no diets that I know of that include those things in any quantity and I was always too embarrassed to ask how to incorporate the foods I do love in quantities I can live with.

This year I may have done that! I won't tell you what it is because I don't want your opinions of why it is not good for me. I just spent two weeks being scanned, tested, probed, weighed and investigated. My doctors concur with each other. I am doing better physically than I have in years. They are very pleased even a little shocked.

It is with minimal exercise because my feet and ankles are always in a state of flux. Pain is part of living with them. It means being very hungry between meals, but mostly just that last hour or two. I think I can do this!

It won't make me immortal, but it greatly enhances the time I have left.

Differences

 

We all have a process and it is so personal!

Everyone has steps they perceive as necessary when they are doing something.

I like to organize my life and for me that means minimizing. Down sizing. Finding a way to have the richest, most fulfilling life with the least amount of stuff. I don't feel the need to get anyone else's opinion about it. For me it is just instinctively the right thing to do.

For me.

My sister always wants a consensus. She needs everyone to tell her she's doing it right and she needs reasons for not doing it now, or later. She likes to accumulate stuff and she does it in the name of helping her kids, grandkids and great grandkids. It is such a part of her that she has filled a basement, a garage and even a storage unit for the past few years.

While I live in half of a one bedroom apartment, she lives in a two bedroom house with a double garage.

We both spend money. We both charge things. We both buy things for other people, but our reasoning and thoughts behind it all are totally different.

This room is cozy

 

I sit in what should be the bedroom of my apartment, only I sleep in the front room where the air conditioning is better during the summer.

This room is cozy. 

The front room becomes the funnel for my life, beginning with the photographs and paintings in my above the cupboard's gallery. It is the work room, the place I cook and paint, pay bills and wash clothes.

The hallway draws me over with my books and more photos. Places where things I love smile at me from among the words I love.

And this room is cozy.

It is filled with love. Actually my entire apartment only houses those things I love. Nothing else is worth keeping, but this room condenses that into my favorite painting, my favorite toys, my favorite clothes, and my big comfy chair. 

This room is cozy.

It is a warm place where people I love call me and where I write what my heart is feeling. This room is the difference between growing old alone and growing old lonely. Here I feel safe and warm and happy. Here I am surrounded by love in every form.  I can leave to be with friends, but I am not lonely.

This room is cozy.

Impaired

 

My life has been consumed by medical procedures lately. Culminating with an appointment with my nephrologist on Monday, I have had a bone scan, kidney scan, and blood tests. I've lowered my A1C, lost weight and done my best to make this old body the best it can be.

So I decided to just kick back and relax the other night. I turned on Netflix, picked a movie and, since I have a new sound box, flicked around trying to turn off the subtitles I have relied on for the last year. I decided on Just Like Heaven, a bit of fluff that seemed appropriate.

It began with a soft endearing male voice, "Clouds and a crescent moon are reflected in a pool of water . . ."

I thought, well, this is unusual.

It continued through out the movie, "the man and the woman lay down facing each other, their hands lightly touching," or something like that.

This narrator made the movie even more comical. I wondered how they ever came up with such a funny technique. I enjoyed it and watched the whole thing, kind of marveling at such an odd way of presenting such a movie.

The next day I turned on Shrek 2.  A gentle voice read all the opening credits out loud and I thought, "How lovely for children!"

Then the voice continued, "Under a shaft of golden light a large book bound in leather opens." This movie was also being narrated! Prince Charming appears and the voice continued, "He shakes his blonde hair." 

It slowly dawned on me. Something was not right!

In my attempt to turn off the subtitles I had activated the English Audio Description, evidently it is an aid for the visually impaired.

Sometimes I am impaired in other ways!