Procrastination

 

Those of you who are unaware of the art of procrastination are about to be enlightened.  Those of you who think only laggards procrastinate are about to be enlightened. And those of you who who do not think at all may be entertained!

I never considered myself a procrastinator until recently.  I always perceived myself as someone who simply liked to consider all the possibilities before subjecting myself to any kind of physical labor, at which point, I jump to it and take care of the task at hand.

Recently, though, I realized that there is a process to procrastination, at least in my case. For example: I accumulate a pile of stuff. Old clothes, old books, outdated things of one sort or another and I put them all in one place for disposal.

Then I must decide how I will dispose of them. Will I throw them away, recycle, or perhaps even sell them? 

After that I need to figure out how to get them to the trash can, thrift store, or online for someone to buy.

And during this process I often discover the pile of "stuff" getting larger, heavier, more awkward until I am almost overwhelmed by the thought of removing it. I begin to dread moving it and try to devise ways of transporting such an enormous pile without killing myself. I may even lie awake nights pondering this problem.

But eventually I give up looking for an easier way and just go in, pick it up, and take it wherever it needs to go. Problem solved! It wasn't half as heavy, or awkward as my mind had made it over a few days. 

Procrastination has the possibility of becoming a weighty problem.

Cremation or something else

 

My brother was cremated. Mostly because his children could not afford a costly funeral home ordeal that would not reflect him in any real way.

Instead his ashes were given to his oldest daughter who organized a gathering of family members at his favorite fishing spot. There she and her brothers said the twenty third psalm and everyone prepared to go to his farm. Once at the farm, the ashes were opened to anyone wanting to help spread a handful of Tom onto the land and into the wind of his favorite place on earth.

We talked about him with family and friends and it was the modern day, sunshiny version of an Irish wake. A grandson happened to snap a photo of my brother's four children throwing his ashes into the air. You can see what appears to be almost an aura above them, really his dust. It is one of the most touching pictures I have ever seen. 

Afterwards anyone who wanted to, went out to dinner at a local restaurant which sort of replaced the old custom of going back to the house after the funeral. This was the most meaningful funeral I have ever been to. It definitely reflected on who my brother was and what he would have appreciated if he had been alive.

Rather than supporting the usurious rates of cemetery plots, funeral homes, embalming and other expensive paraphernalia of modern day death dealers, I think it is time to make death a personal experience. I still have the feeling that my brother is here beside me, part of the sky, the earth and the wind.

The fine line

     

I am seventy two years old and in reasonably good shape, but I find myself constantly barraged by people wanting me to have more exploratory tests and services all the time. I do many of them, but I find medical tests extraordinarily anxiety producing. There has to be a line where they are not the most important thing in my life.

My A1C is very good. My blood pressure is very good. My weight is improving daily. I am walking twenty minutes a day, sleeping good, eating a healthy diet so that my kidneys are no worse now than they were five years ago. I had a mammogram, a bone density test and both were fine.

Now I want to just get on with my life minus any nagging guilt that I should go have this or that test done in order to prolong my life. 

I do not want to end up in a death warehouse, otherwise known as nursing home. I do not want to linger on life support.  I do not want to live without a quality life. Once I do not enjoy life anymore, I am perfectly willing to check out.

People deserve to live and die with dignity and they deserve to be the caretakers of their own bodies and lives. The older I get the finer the line between these things becomes.

Happy Anniversary

At two p.m. today I passed the 52nd. anniversary of my marriage that actually ended in 1998. I never remarried. Once was enough and the truth is I actually knew him for two years before we got married. 

I've learned a lot from that marriage and the subsequent relationships. The biggest lesson is perhaps that I am not really a candidate for such an intimate relationship. I tend to become subservient to whoever I am close to and then I resent it. The next biggest lesson is: do not marry anyone who isn't already your best friend and the person you can share anything with. I have one of those and it is so much more fulfilling than my marriage ever was.

The other side of forging such a relationship has nothing to do with me. Unless it is that I am wiser now than I was fifty odd years ago. Marrying a second time, or late in life should come with warnings. Do not marry a divorced person. They are divorced for a reason. (Yes, me too.) And do not marry someone who has never married by fifty. There is a reason for that too.

Marriage is a legal construct that mostly benefits any children resulting from it, but it is certainly no guarantee of that either. My husband decided he was done financing the kid's education when he was remarried to another woman. He still uses them to move his furniture, etc, but feels no real need to nurture or care for them. He doesn't even know the correct birthdays for two of them!

I have a wonderful relationship with a person who does not live in my home, nor I in his. We have no mutual restraining orders on each others' lives and we feel no need to lie or contort ourselves in any way in order to love each other. It is, perhaps, the most perfect relationship I have ever been in. I trust him explicitly. 

And I think trust may be the most important trait in the world. 

Easter memories

     

Easter was as exciting as Valentine's Day, Christmas and Halloween when I was a child.

I remember the anticipation was so great I could barely go to sleep on Easter Eve.

And that is funny because I don't and didn't really like most of the candy. I liked the milk chocolate, but nothing covered in a coating, or anything like jelly beans, or marshmallows. We didn't even have plastic eggs then, so there was no refilling and re-hiding the eggs.

Still I couldn't wait to dye the eggs my dad boiled the night before and find the two baskets the Easter bunny hid for each of us the next morning. I would play for weeks with them, making nests for the jelly beans and Peeps, sorting and playing house with my candy until my siblings sneaked in and ate it all, or my mother put the baskets away.

We usually didn't go to church, but we often got new clothes and I loved that, even if I only wore them to my grandma's house for dinner. I remember one year I got a new hat, gloves, black patent leather purse and shoes with a tiny wedge heel. Another year I got a copper hued dress with copper patent leather shoes. We sang "In your Easter bonnet" and "Here comes Peter Cottontail." Sometimes we left the Bunny a carrot and he left us a note. We knew it was really him because of the giant tooth marks!

It was pretty much the same for my children except they got books as well as candy in their baskets and there were also plastic eggs they would refill and re-hide afterwards. Plus we all went to church before coming home and having hot cinnamon buns for breakfast.

Pictures

I like to paint. Mostly on canvas, but I draw in a sketch book with a plain old pencil, erasing runaway lines with a little white stub of an eraser. These are my hobbies, my artful foray into expressing myself in tangible ways the eye can see.

You draw too, but your words are stronger, heavier, more tangible than colors on medium.

Your words paint pictures in my mind. Brilliant, gory pictures in full color, etched into the thoughts that permeate my entire being. Your pictures are infused with feelings that bring them to life so that they shout at me while I drink my coffee, read my emails, even sleep.

A conversation with you fills me to the brim with horror, frustration, depression, anger at myself that I cannot be better, do not feel sympathy for you, that I dredge up only anger and feelings of futility. We are not good for each other.

I cannot give you what you need and you give me things I cannot live with.

Effort

I know someone who truly believes their life and the way they look is because they have worked harder and led a harder life than those of us they believe have had an easier one.

Part of that is probably true, but sometimes living a harder life, or working harder is due to the choices we make. Although hard times and bad luck can happen to anyone, it is more likely to happen when people are careless or thoughtless. 

Also, everyone has hard times. Who can judge which ones are harder? Each of us has to deal with life when it happens to us. How we feel about that, how we respond to it, and the changes we make after assessing these difficulties really does make a difference.

We all know people who seem to have more problems than the rest of us. Is it possible these people make different choices than others would under the same circumstances? 

The way is seldom smooth, but the bumps in the road are a lot more noticeable if you refuse to put shock absorbers on your wheels and, let's face it, some people don't even use wheels. They just bounce along, ricocheting off the walls and blaming everything around them for the jostling they take.

Living smarter, trying to learn from mistakes, making changes along the way is worth the effort.

It's a matter of trust

 

You might think that someone bending over backwards would please me. That the offer, desire, frantic need to be low dog on the totem pole, servant beyond reason, humble past endurance, would make someone lovable to me, but it does not.

That need to stand when others sit, to carry everyone's food to the table, to drive others to the door then park the car blocks away and walk back, should elicit some kind of admiration, or at least appreciation on my part, but it does not.

Maybe because it is blended with a need to appear long suffering and down trodden. Maybe because it is coupled with a disdain for ordinary good fare and simple obedience to the rules of the road others consider normal. Maybe because I have the feeling they are bending over backwards to kiss their own behind.

When the desire to please supersedes normal behavior I find it suspect.. 

A person willing to morph into the lowest common denominator in spite of being brought up differently feels less than honest to me. It is as if their willingness to wait on me is to prove something and I'm not sure what it is. There is something terrifying in the two faced person I see smiling at me out of the side of their overly humble face like a person who can be passive aggressively evil.

I guess maybe it boils down to the fact that I do not trust obsequious people.

Lapsed atheist

 

I read a letter on poetry today and heard a phrase I had never heard before, but which described many interesting moments in my life.

As a romantically religious child, I grew up collecting stories of the Catholic saints, candy striping at a Catholic hospital and attending various churches and Sunday schools with my Grandmother, great aunts, and friends. In Mermaids, the mother tells her daughter, who is obsessed with Catholicism, "Charlotte, we're Jewish." Nobody ever told me that. I was desperate to be Catholic, or Jewish, or anything except what I was, a mid century child growing up with two religiously lapsed parents, both of whom had been very religious at some point in their lives. My father as an Episcopalian and my mother a Baptist.

I married a man with a religious name who was a devout Episcopalian, still serving as an acolyte even as he went to college. I am still not sure what attracted me to him more, the fact that he seemed to care for me, his romantic name, or religious bent, which later turned out to have been heavily based on both the priest's daughter and the regulation pool table in the church's hall, but why is probably not important. I did marry him and became a devout Episcopalian for many years.

I taught Sunday school, put out the church newsletter, produced little acolytes and thurifers and even angels for the pageant every Christmas. Priests, ministers, nuns, and chaplains numbered among my closest friends. Our social lives revolved around the church and the people therein.

Until it didn't.

The intolerable hypocrites who began to try and run the church had something to do with that, as did the intolerant teachers in the junior high Sunday school who did not brook any real questions. Plus my marriage began faltering a little more every year until finally, divorced, supporting myself, and released from the constant need to appear holier than thou, I began to think. The thoughts are ones I have written about in previous thoughts, but mostly they began to un-deify god and strengthen my belief in something bigger and greater than the jealous creature created in the Bible.

I am very comfortable with my beliefs now, but there are still times when the old need to talk to someone finds me doing just that. Dear God . . .

I have even found myself considering joining my friend and his congregation occasionally. Some of those people were very good friends during important parts of my life, but my present belief system always made that feel awkward.  What do I say when they ask where I have been? 

Because, actually, I am still there. 

Today I heard a phrase that describes me for those times when I need some carefully defined words to utter in response to those questions, and it is: 

Sometimes I am a lapsed atheist.

So

 

The effort to emphasize something makes me use the word, so. 

Such a small word, an insignificant word, an overused word.

But there is no other word simple, or strong, enough to replace it.

A larger word seems to negate the weight of my feeling, reducing it to sounds, ego, thoughts stealing away the immense pressure of the moment.

I am bursting with feeling

Overwhelmed by emotions

And that tiny word becomes the pivotal point 

Balancing this moment.

Stories

 

I grew up around a large family filled with aunts, uncles, great aunts, great uncles and grandmothers. I even knew my grandfather and his mother. Our family home became a Guest home for elderly ladies and they filled my life with true stories of log cabins, Indians, and old fashioned customs. I even knew a lady who was scalped and saw the round scar left on her head when she was twelve.

I took my youth for granted, but I did sometimes wonder what I would look like when I was old and gray, or maybe even white headed. I hoped I would not end up in a guest home, or rest home and I hoped my children would not forget to visit me. 

I knew women with ten children who never saw even one most of the year, but that is beside the point. Now I am certainly not white headed, but I am gray and I am on the older side of adulthood. I am relieved that I don't look as old as I thought I might, but that could be perspective. People in their forties look very young to me now.

I am fortunate to live in a time of computers and cell phones. I talk to my son almost daily and hear from my daughter fairly frequently. I have a young friend who calls me every day without fail and adds so much to my life. These things keep me young, I believe.

Gone are the days when folks left home on a covered wagon and never returned and gone are the times when a long distance call was prohibitively expensive. We live in instant times, when everyone is just a few seconds away. We can talk, share pictures, even video chat. but that does not make those times I spent listening to the elderly share their stories any less special.

And nothing has replaced a hug.