I admire them

 

I like good people. So, you ask, who doesn't, but I'm not talking about handsome people, well bred people, rich people, or even just kind people.

I'm talking about people who stand for things that are important. People who make a difference by simply being who they are. 

People who don't just talk the talk, but actually walk the walk.  They pay attention and really listen.

Nobody is perfect, but good people try to do the right thing. They don't enable others because it is easier or makes them feel good. They are not snobs or reverse snobs.  

Good people are open minded and fair. They want to know the truth and will go out of their way to find it.

It is easy to confuse labels with reality. I've known a lot of people who should be good people if all I do is look at their titles, or job descriptions, but you really can sound like a good person and not be one. You may not be bad, but you are not necessarily good by default.

A truly good person has character. Their word is as good as their life. They actually do treat others the way they want to be treated.  Most of them are life long students in one way or another, always wanting to learn more in order to do the right thing.

They may not do everything I want them to, or you want them to, but they do the things their heart tells them is important. They cannot be push overs.

It isn't easy to be a truly good person.

Sacred moments

 

What brings you joy?

Is there one thing in particular that makes it impossible for you not to grin from ear to ear and quiver with excitement?

Are there moments in your life where you literally want to dance with joy?

Moments when tears fill your eyes and your heart melts?

What makes you unequivocally happy?

These are the sacred moments.

Looking for love

I am amazed at how many people jump on the love band wagon without really knowing what music is going to be played.

So many people seem to feel that anyone is better than no one, but believe me when I say there are far worse things in this world than being alone.

After last year I am skeptical of everyone, but especially of those people who begin asking me to be their girl friend, or love, or whatever right away. Those first innuendos are the wind that slams the door between them and me. 

I've seen what bad relationships are like. I've been in one. I have no desire to repeat that experience. 

Understanding and respect are the warp and woof of true love. These things take time to develop, but if they do then they weave something extraordinary.

Extraordinary is worth waiting for -- forever if necessary.

Faltering

 

I find  a lovely chalk picture outside my front door and I am so surprised and happy. Then I begin to think and wonder if maybe it was for my neighbors? I have a conversation with someone who likes my paintings online and then wonder if they are going to ask me for money later on?

People I have chatted with for a very long time disappear for days and I wonder if they are tired of me? 

I go to work and wonder if people at my new job like me, or have problems with me that they aren't telling me about. 

I play my keyboard and sometimes I take off the headphones and play out loud, but then I worry that I might be annoying someone.

I live in a town where many of the people who play music are professionals, where the artists sell their work, where degrees are more common than factory workers. Everyone around me seems to be an expert on something.

I am a jack of all trades and master of none and that actually serves me well until I begin questioning myself.

Without my Muse to encourage me I falter.

Kindred faces

 

I took the cup of milk from her trembling hand and placed it on the table. Her eyes met mine, grateful for being noticed, an adult needing an outlet for some emotional distress.

In my heart I knew she was hurting, but I also recognized the need to be dramatic and noticed. I've felt like that before when I was miserable and didn't know what to do, but needed to do something.

Forever conscious of the words drama queen and terrified of ever being one I have kept myself in check for most of my life, but there are subtle ways of doing the same thing.

I am an actor with amazing skills if the need arises, simply because my mind believes what I tell it and it becomes real for me. Not the kind of actor who performs upon a stage, but one who sheds tears over a made up story, or produces some other visible example of distress when it feels needed. My emotions hover just below the surface of my being, always ready to step up and take over.

Everyone knows someone who gets sick when they need attention. They are really sick, but there is that niggling doubt in our head about its cause. They've used their mind to work themselves into a frenzy that manifests in physical ailments.  It's not a skill anyone would cultivate on purpose, but one that seems to start in childhood and because it works, continues.

These people ignite a righteous indignation and intolerance in me. Probably because I recognize myself, or my own tendencies somewhere in their make up. Instead of reacting to that I try to look deeper and see if I can find the real pain in them, but it isn't always easy.

Bringing up baby

The world is a big place.

When I was bringing up my children I would sometimes wonder how I would survive them leaving home, but isn't that the goal of a good parent?

We want our children to have the skills to survive on their own. Honestly we want them to thrive!

My children are now scattered across the country, the closest one still nearly eleven hours by car away from me. 

I miss them, but I am confident they are okay, or more than okay without me there. Each one has gone off in their own time and used the skills they have to make a good life. I feel good about that.

I might wish things were easier for them, but I know they will each continue to grow and learn and adjust to whatever comes their way. 

If I never do anything else in my life that is a great accomplishment. I gave each of my children the best life I knew how to give. They were loved, fed, clothed, given music lessons and played sports. They were taught about religion and politics, health and manners. All of them could sit down at any table in the world and hold their own. They are kind, empathetic human beings who know how to work, how to play, and how to love.

Bringing up a human being is something that will ripple outward for generations to come.

The Angell's Tale

 

I am searching for the fairy tale with my name on it. The one that ends, and she lived happily ever after. 

I am a child of the fifties. Television came into my world at the age of three or four when I was naive enough to believe those little people galloping around on tiny white horses lived inside that box and if my Daddy would just open it up, I could play with them like I did my dolls.

I napped to Queen For A Day. I imagined a field filled with plants that had baby kittens just waiting to be picked. My Daddy took me to a store where he bought me my first pen. It was silver and sky blue and I knew I would write wondrous things with it. Most of the world lived outside of mine.

My world was a Mommy who told me she could be anyone, that the woman before me might not really be Mommy, but Santa Claus watching to see if I was good. It was a Daddy who sat with me at the dining room table for conferences about giving up my bottle at bedtime and to show me photographs of a real crown in a book.

They were the powers that governed my first four years. My mother was busy. Our time together was spent ironing, me the handkerchiefs, her, everything else, while we talked. I "got" to clean the bathroom floor on my hands and knees with a rag and Ajax, because I was a big girl. No one thought about safety in those days. At least not in our house. I began doing cross stitch at four and learned to write the number 10 with my pen on the back of a shirt cardboard that my father's shirts came back on from the cleaners.

It never occurred to me that there was any other time and place for everything. For me the time was always now and here. The only stories I heard were my grandmother's oral tales about country mice and city mice, or the occasional little Golden book my mother might read. Books for me were almost nonexistent until I learned to read. Then on my sixth birthday my father's mother, my other grandmother, gave me a book of Grimm's Fairy Tales. All those words and no pictures! 

But that same grandmother also took me to see a puppet show called, Rumpelstilskin, and my imagination was set on fire. Hungry for stories and with no access to the city library, I began devouring my book of fairy tales along with the books my father put on the hall bookshelf. Junior Classics, Books of Lands and People, The Book of Knowledge. These were the places my dreams began.

All of these things, stories, books and television programs, had a beginning, a middle and an end. I assumed my life would too. I cannot tell you how often I have found myself as the narrator of my life in that moment, almost as if I were outside it looking in.

My marriage, instead of being the glory years, turned out to be the Cinderella years with my children taking the place of the prince to change the story around to happily ever after once they were part of my life. My divorce was the time spent locked up in the wicked witch's candy house, wondering if I would end up in the oven, or outside eating cake. And this past year was the great love affair that ended in soul shattering despair! 

Now, for the first time ever maybe, I have stepped out of the fairy tale and onto the pages of my own biography. Not an autobiography, there is nothing auto in my life. Ever. But this life where I am aware everything depends on me is a novelty. Whoever wrote my story forgot that it had to end happily ever after. It might not! Or maybe it will, if I choose the right adventure each time.

I keep searching for the right words, the ultimate authority, a fool proof God, a belief system that survives all intruders. I keep hoping to find The Angell's Tale.

Mistakes

 

One mistake can affect so many other things. 

Yesterday I got my first paycheck, the result of a mistake I made last winter that has changed my entire life.

For the first time ever my checking account was over drawn. Not my fault. I paid the water company last week, but for some reason they took it out again this week! I have their email saying it was paid, but evidently that does not matter to automated machines. 

My bank has been extraordinary. When I called and told them what happened they called me back to say as long as I deposit my paycheck by two o'clock they will not charge me the overdraft fee. 

After today I hope there will be some normalcy in my life again. At least until tax time when I will have to pay taxes on all the money I lost in the scam. 

It is a strange thing to be working and afraid to spend the money I make because I may need it to pay taxes. 

Working women

 

Yes there is life after work.

At last!

This is my third week, but only my second week of being in the classroom and I usually come home so tired I collapse in my chair for the rest of the afternoon,  but yesterday, for the first time, I had the urge to do something else.

About four thirty I rearranged my bedroom and put the keyboard in the living room where I can leave everything set up for playing. I moved the bed and switched it with my big recliner in the bedroom, then slid all the other furniture into better spots too. I like it. I always like it when I first rearrange furniture.

Today my muscles are tired, but otherwise I feel better than yesterday when I was having doubts about this job. 

Doubts are okay, but not having this job is not an option. I need it and I'm not likely to find anything else as perfect for me, so I have to go in with a positive attitude and make it work.

I remember the farm women who would move into town for the winter when I was a child. They needed paying work and would come work for my grandmother cleaning or working in the kitchen. It was hard work involving lots of stairs and being on their feet for eight hours. I wonder how old they really were? They seemed ancient to me at the time.

I remember the hair nets they wore and the missing teeth in their mouths, but I also remember their smiles and how kind they were to me when I would tag around behind them. Now I know that when they went home they still had to take care of their homes and their husbands. There was no sitting down at the computer in those days. 

They had names like Violet or Millie that made them sound like the girls they once were, but when I knew them they were white haired with sun browned wrinkled faces and soft voices. In the summer they cleaned their own homes and cooked big meals for the men in the fields while working in their gardens and hanging out their laundry on clotheslines and rearing their children. They killed chickens and milked cows and made biscuits and still found time for church on Sunday morning and Wednesday nights.

My life is so much easier. I need to remember that.

I'm doing this

 

The novelty of working is starting to wear off. 

I'm really doing this!

I've taken hours of classes. I am up to date on CPR, First Aid, Child Care, Child Safety, SIDS, Health, and so many things I had almost forgotten about since I last worked with small children.

I'm learning my place in this classroom.

The routines are different than a private preschool, but the objective and ways are very similar, so it isn't so strange.

And yet it feels surreal. Like I'm playing a part in some play rather than going to work.

Water magic

The ocean is a giant womb

Cradling whales and dolphins

And ancient tombs.

Sliding onto the shore each night

Making love to the earth

In sweet love bites.

Leaving behind a plethora of shells

Driftwood, sea glass

And salty sea smells.

A whole new world

Twenty five years ago this month I was divorced from a man I had been with since I was eighteen. I had never lived alone in my life, going from my parent's house with three siblings, to college, to my husbands house where we raised three children.

After the divorce I had to get my own condo, my own checking account, my own car, a new job and figure out life by myself for the first time. I made lots of mistakes. I also made new friends, tried out alternative ways of living, and moved around a lot.

Now, twenty five years later I feel like I am finally coming to terms with who I am. I am not at all the same woman I was at eighteen, or thirty, or even fifty!

For the first time in my life I am choosing to go to bed early and get up early. I hadn't thought it was possible to do this out of choice, but it suits me at this stage. I am back working with small children, something I seem to have a knack for and I am finding a way to cope with my bad feet while still working. 

I have always had creative hobbies, but in the past they were mostly writing or sewing. Now I find I enjoy painting most of all. My exercise comes from working not walking around the block. I am surprised at how my life is shaping up. It is not at all like it has been in the past, nor is it anything like I thought it would be.

But it is good!

Smile for me

My mother had a poem tacked up on her kitchen wall about smiles. It started out: There are smiles that make us happy, there are smiles that make us sad, but one worthwhile is the one who can smile when everything goes dead wrong. I think it was a take off from an Ella Wheeler Wilcox poem, but that is beside the point.

Actually I think people have to be careful about smiling when things go dead wrong. It can look macabre. A leer, a grin, an empathetic look, all these things are accompanied by eyes and actions that can change a smile drastically. 

But there are smiles that can light up a whole room in a flash. My Muse has one of those. When he smiles it radiates from his eyes, his face, his whole being. It reminds me of babies when their entire body smiles and quivers with joy 

There is nothing more beautiful than a genuine, loving smile. It has to be accompanied with something deep inside the person that transforms it from a practiced look to a real feeling. It is rarer than you might think, so whenever it happens you should feel blessed.

The meaning of life

If there is any meaning to life it is so diverse that it is impossible to corner.

Biologically I suppose our reason for living is to maintain the species, specifically one with our genes.

But I think life is like everything else. Meaning comes from what you are. That old if all you have is a hammer idea, then everything is a nail is actually pretty true. We can't be what we can't conceive.

Our ideas change as we grow older. Ask a three year old what they want to be and they might say a fireman, but ask that same child after he's had a few music lessons and he might say a musician!

Or maybe he just heard some music that touched him to the core, but in some way he had to connect with music to believe it had meaning for him. That's why the arts are so important in school.

A child that grows up on a farm knows about crops and animals and how weather affects growing things, but city kids need field trips so they see these options too.

Lucky people seem to know who they are from day one, but most of us have to try out our dreams and sift through them looking for the one that touches our heart.

So, maybe the meaning of life is to never stop searching the world or your heart, because the meaning of life can change.

Reduced Circumstances

 

I retired in 2002 never thinking that was what I was doing, but no one wanted to hire a 52 year old former preschool teacher, office worker and floral clerk. 

So I volunteered. I volunteered so much that I found myself on the cover of a local magazine about volunteers! 

I volunteered at an Aviation Museum, I volunteered at all sorts of local events and whenever the YWCA needed someone to stuff envelopes or do that sort of thing I was there. But eventually I was back to my old stomping grounds, volunteering in an elementary school library which led to also volunteering in a kindergarten class. 

Then COVID came along and I stopped volunteering until I did something pretty stupid and lost most of my retirement income. Finding myself in reduced circumstances approaching my mid seventies, I was distraught, but in the words of the famous poet Maya Angelou:

You may not control all the events that happen to you, but you can decide not to be reduced by them.

I decided to try and go back to work again. This time I was hired by a preschool learning center and today was my first day back to work at a paying job in over twenty years!  

I won't say it was easy, my feet were very tired when I came home today, but I think this is going to be a really good thing in my life. I have experience with small children and yet a day care setting is different from a simple preschool. 

I have a lot to learn, but I am certainly willing and able.

Hard won

I suppose people have searched for meaning, for support, for religion, since they had time apart from filling their stomachs or keeping the fire burning. 

Those small moments of contemplation, navel gazing or fire gazing, or maybe just looking within, are the bait that draws us to gods. 

Omnipotent beings who do not have to struggle to stay alive.

It is the relief that comes when there is no relief. That belief that somewhere, some day there is, or will be a place without hunger, worry, fear of being eaten, assaulted, or frozen, or any of the other of those worldly things that assail us here on earth.

And because everything else in this world is hard won, this god must be too, so we created a jealous god, a demanding god, a human god requiring us to jump through hoops to please it.  Because? Because everything else in this world is hard won and difficult, so God must be too.

But what if this god is everything? Not just all powerful, but all beings? What if god does not sit in the sky watching us, but lives in our cells, in the atoms of everything that is?  

What if we physically come from a power just as directly as our children come from our DNA?

Not soul-y connected, but physically. Deep inside every part of us, waiting to be recognized, ready to aid us in ways most of us have never dreamed of, lies a god we will never understand. A god just as real as our hearts and hands, but infinitely more powerful and complicated.

An ineffable power that evolved a universe, watching its children grow and learn and live, what a hard won concept that would be.

Red tape

Gone are the days when someone could walk into a store and get a job!

Now there are interminable things to go through online just to get an application, then there are a even more things to do before you can begin work if you are hired.

I spent all yesterday morning navigating my doctor's office where a wellness check up included a living will, power of attorney and lost blood tests! In the end they did a tb skin test but sent me to a pharmacy to get the immunizations I needed.

That began a whole new series of waiting in line and misinformation. Finally that pharmacy sent me downtown to another pharmacy! Just finding a parking place was difficult before I began the waiting process here. After filling out all kinds of paperwork, waiting for them to call my doctor and waiting for my doctor to call back, they decided they could only give me one of the shots because the other one would cause a false reading on my tb skin test. Now I have to call them in the morning and go in again at noon to get the last shot.

I also have to go back to my doctor tomorrow morning to get the tb skin test read and if I am able to navigate the last of the paperwork online today, I will finally start working Monday morning. Then I am hoping this will be a dream job.

Three hours a day working with children 3-5 is right in my ballpark of skills. Not to mention this place is so well designed and staffed that it is about as close as anyone could hope a home away from home for children could be. It is like working with a handful of the world's best mothers whose only focus is to get their children ready for the world in the best way possible.

I am truly blessed.

Most valuable worker

Our society claims to want equality, but what we have aimed for is shattering the glass ceiling, as if the only important part of equality is in the business world. Money is the goal we value most. not people, but it is people who determine the quality of life. 

Why we have to say one thing is better than the rest I'm not sure. Why not admit that every job is important, that without every cog in the machine, it will eventually bog down and die? The reason for the apparent failure may be hard to pinpoint, especially if it is something we consider insignificant and unimportant, but it will still happen. 

Those first years, meaning birth to late teens, create the human being whose decisions will define lives for generations to come.  Life does not start with a degree from some prestigious university. It starts the moment our first cries are met with understanding or disdain. The caretakers and teachers of our youngest members of society lay the foundation for what is to come.

Childhood is the training ground for the people who ultimately decide if and how we live or die. It  might behoove us to value the people who bring these children up.

Uncharted territory

 

I have always been my greatest mystery. You might expect that of a toddler. Everything is new to them. I remember the first time I managed to put on clothes all by myself. I looked in the mirror and there I was, not quite three years old in a blue seersucker nightgown and bunny slippers. It must have impressed me, because I still remember it.

It's not much different now. I am still a treasure chest filled with surprises. 

Every time I try something new I am amazed at myself when it works out. Which is not the same thing as saying I excel at it, just that I can do it. 

It is sort of like being dipped in the fountain of youth. The novelty of a new thing is often a challenge, generally invigorating, and sometimes accompanied by hives! Yet in the end it improves my life in some way.

I think the secret is expecting to succeed and not having too many preconceived ideas. As long as my head is above water I'm headed in the right direction. I may not have a road map, or really any map at all, but as long as I keep moving, I am ahead of the game.

Changing the system

Today I start training for a new job! 

My mother died at 58, fourteen years before she reached my age. My father was in a nursing home for several years before dying just short of his 73 birthday, which will be my next one. When my daughter was home she said, "You could get a job Mom." Her belief in me doing this opened a door.

My Muse has helped me once more. He suggested reading Atomic Habits by James Clear. It is the perfect book for me right now as I try to reinvent and become my best self.

I am trying to think of myself as the person I want to be, need to be, if this new phase of my life is going to be as good as it can be. So I am trying to change the system. One tiny habit at a time.

I've been going to bed early and getting up early for the last three weeks.  I am a morning person now. I have also been walking every day, so I think I can safely say I am relatively athletic for my age. My muse urged me to go back to playing on my keyboard -- I'm a musician!  I am also an artist!  You get the idea. 

It really is the journey that counts and it is the way I see myself on this journey.  Beginning today I am also a member of the working class,  a full fledged person contributing to my own and other people's well being. 

That may all sound a little grand to you, but it astounds me. A few months ago I was ready to pack it in, end my life. I had totally given up. Now I am not just alive, I am excited.

Suffering

People are most comfortable with people similar to themselves. They want to do things the way they are accustomed to doing them and any changes can make them extremely uncomfortable.

I know someone who always used their job as an excuse not to do anything they didn't want to do.  It seemed like a noble and rational way to deal with their life. Then they retired and for a while they were stuck, but not long after that they took in an addict and once more they had an excuse for everything. The addict couldn't be trusted alone. The addict cost so much to feed. The addict needed to be taken to doctors, hospitals, and social services.  This person has a friend who is very similar and the two of them are happy as clams suffering together.

Everyone is a little dysfunctional, but the degree varies vastly. People on the low end have a difficult time understanding that they really can't help someone who chooses to create their own problems. Unhappy people fake laughing and joy and assume that no one can tell the difference. They do crazy things and pretend that it is because they are free spirits when no one is bound tighter by self made restrictions than they are. I think the only person they fool is themselves.

If these things make them happy then they have a right to live this way, but their dysfunction rolls over onto the people around them, making everyone's lives darker and more complicated. They suck in children and tarnish their lives, making them feel responsible and part of a situation they are neither ready for, nor deserve, creating more dysfunctional people. 

The rest of us are sometimes caught in a quandary. Do we enable them like they want and become part of the problem? Do we continue to offer help that they don't want? Do we simply learn to avoid them? 

If these people are family it is not an easy decision.

Evolution

 

I was curious. How did one cell ever decide to unite with other cells so that life as we know it can exist? It turns out time is the answer; billions of years where cells discover there are benefits to specializing in a group, but that even these specializations require limits if growth is to continue. It appears the old adage is true. Things are only as strong as their weakest members, so cells developed ways to get rid of freeloaders and nature made reproduction difficult for loners. It seems our social mores started a very long time ago.

I'd like to think we have gone beyond simple survival mode, but I think we have simply honed it to a level nature never dreamed of. Unless, of course, we allow that we are simply part of nature, part of the process of evolution still trying to find the optimal way to exist. A lot of simplies in a very complicated idea.

I wonder what life will be like four hundred billion years from now? 

Will we continue to value specialization over more ethereal things like compassion? And if we do, which things will we put more value on? Money? Health? Quality of life? 

And within those things will we focus on just providing them for a few elite, or everyone? Will we see the value in working together as an opportunity to excel and grow, or simply a way to use others as stepping stones for our own personal gain?

Without some careful cooperation we may evolve ourselves right out of being and give the earth a chance to go another way.

Beautiful Scammer

 

I was walking today and thinking about this last year. In my mind I had already moved into an extraordinary house. It was not my dream house, but it was pretty amazing and because of photographs I knew exactly what it was like. I could see the huge curving staircase floating up to the second floor where our master suite was on the left and outside was a saltwater pool near an old almost defunct orchard. I lived in this house in my head. I sat on the bed having conversations with my love, wandered the grounds while he worked, even imagined us cooking together in the kitchen.

It wasn't my first choice and I had some reservations, but I would be doing it with the love of my life. A person who made me feel loved and valued for exactly who I was. This was the man of my dreams and he adored me! That should have been my first clue, but he was so convincing that bit by bit I sent him every single cent of my retirement fund. Of course he sent me a check that more than covered this along with the money we were going to put as a down payment on our house. Worthless as it turned out.

This man was a dream weaver beyond anything I could ever have imagined or dreamed up on my own. He had just the right amount of authority in his voice, the perfect amount of understanding in his words and the language of an angel. 

I hope he, or she, puts as much thought, love and joy into their real relationships, because they are true artists. They made nothing feel like everything and there was actually nothing there at all. 

This kind of artist left me with no money, wondering if I could even pay my bills and yet . . . And yet, I missed them! My heart ached for them! The heartbreak was worse than the shame, or the poverty. I still can't quite figure out how it happened. I know in the beginning I tried to let this person go, but I was so heartsick I actually went to the doctor to see if I was physically ill and my doctor ran every test conceivable, including a CAT scan.  And then I went back. I couldn't stay away. Twice I deleted all our conversations and I'm sorry about that, because I might be able to use them to write the ultimate love story that this scam was.

For the life of me I can't remember how I got so totally sucked in. I do know that if I were wealthy enough, it would almost be worth the money to feel that way again. The journey was real even if the sentiments on his part were not. It was like a seventy thousand dollar dream. It was perfect right up past the end and sometimes I still feel more like a widow than a mark.