There is nothing worse than not knowing.
Not knowing if someone you love is okay or not okay.
Not knowing why someone has dropped off the radar for over 48 hours.
Not knowing leads to thoughts that conjure terrible things no matter how hard I try to ignore them.
I never want to invent trouble, but remaining positive in the light of rhis rare break in communication has made it difficult not to worry.
How do I write about values?
Once upon a time values meant keeping up appearances for the people around me. Following traditional ideas of who and what makes a person acceptable and good, or admirable.
Now I know I can't please all of the people. Ever! In fact, I probably can't please most of the people completely. Ever! So I need to have some realistic priorities, some idea of who I need to please and that turns out to be me.
Everyone else comes and goes at will. There are no guarantees in this life except that I will be with me till the day I die. I have to come to terms with what is most important to me. What I need to be okay with myself.
I try to be kind, but I need to be real too. There are some things I cannot live with and others that I cannot live without. Those may all change over time too.
In the end I realize that forgiveness is a gift that is often misunderstood and under rated. It is also a very difficult state to reach sometimes, but it is not impossible.
The longer I live, the more likely it is that I will do things I will later regret in some way. That is okay. It is being human, but regret cannot become a great wall that sets the limits for the rest of my life.
It's better if it can become a learning experience that ultimately enriches what is now, because now is where I always have to live.
The secret to inner peace is not being afraid to be yourself.
Whoever you are. Whatever you are.
You cannot deny it forever.
So give in. Give up.
Refine it a bit if you can
But be you.
And enjoy it.
There is nothing more dangerous than a holiday.
Everyone has their own sense of what is important and what is essential.
Traditions are repeated, replaced and re-thought, making it likely that someone's toes will get stepped on at some point.
People talk about those no longer with them and those who just aren't there. Everyone is fair game at these holiday dinners.
We stuff the turkey and we stuff ourselves.
Some people stuff their emotions down deep and others let it all hang out.
That's the beauty of family.
You can be who you are.
.
Why do people draw lines in the dirt that define the living conditions for thousands of people.
What good is religion if it divides people so drastically that they want to kill each other?
Who benefits from war?
These are not ten year old boys playing with their GI Joe dolls.
These are educated adults who value so many things more than life for other humans.
Year after year, century after century, life after life, we continue to reach for our lowest level, to fight for greed and power instead of quality of life for all.
It is a me/them situation that defines human beings at their worst.
Looking for differences to validate their insanity.
It is not enough to say you love a child. Your actions need to show the child what it needs to succeed.
A child is born ready to learn, wanting to learn, needing to learn.
A parent who spoils a child ruins its chances for a happy life and the older the child gets the harder life will become.
Even at the tender age of three, there are children whose parents have made life harder for them by not teaching them to listen and follow directions. And more than that, the child needs to know that it is always expected to do some things.
Of course children won't always follow directions or listen, but if they do it the majority of time they will learn that life is much more pleasant when they do.
In a room full of children all but one will use the potty, put on their training pants, or pull ups and then put their outer clothes back on so that they can go outside and play with all the other children. That one child, who has never been taught that there are rules and consequences, might spend all morning screaming and stomping around alone and angry because it refuses to do these simple things.
This is at age three. Imagine what this child will go through as it ages and the rules and consequences become greater and greater! In the end it will become an adult who cannot fit into civilized society. Angry and alone because it was never taught there are some rules everyone is expected to follow and the consequences for not following them will be harsher and harsher as they grow older.
The big moments are always a surprise.
They sneak up on you, disguised as something unexpected and emerge even bigger.
About this time last year I met the love of my life, a demon named Simon but only for the moment.
I lived a whole lifetime in those four months. It was a dream come true, made perfect.
I never wanted to wake up.
But I did and now I live in a different world.
Everything is different.
I don't do anything the same. It has all changed.
Now I go to work and I go to sleep.
Half in this world and half out. Like Persephone but without the help of Zeus.
I just read a book by a really good author that was both fascinating and difficult.
Nothing about this book was familiar to me. Not the language, or the topography. I initially felt a bit lost, like I was reading in another language, which in a sense I was. Australian.
The slang, the names of the wild life, the geography, none of it was easy for an American, raised in America and limited by American education, but it was fascinating.
In the beginning I just kept reading, hoping that simple immersion would fill me in. Later I began looking up some of the words and especially photos of the landscape.
The story was compelling and sometimes horrifying. It is about child abuse at some of its worst and the product of that abuse as a boy enters his mid to late teens on the road to manhood.
The boy takes off, like a child might do after a terrifying incident and runs away, but he runs into a landscape that is totally unforgiving. I found this symbolic of his life up to that point. As he runs he discovers what he probably should have brought along with him and is forced to both make do and succeed by his hard won skill for surviving under the worst circumstances.
Ultimately he meets a scraggly old man living in a shepherd's hut.
The man is as reconciled to his life as the boy is in changing his own and so the two life styles begin to bump into one another.
I never discovered exactly why the old man was out there, marooned and isolated, partly by his own choice I think and partly because he felt it was his only hope of redeeming himself without seeking redemption through traditional ways.
The ending was hard to read and yet when the book was finished I felt intrigued and good. I'm glad I read it. It's given me so much for food for thought.
You might enjoy Tim Winton's, The Shepherd's Hut.
Once upon a time, a very long time, nearly fifty six years, ago, a beautiful maiden left her college dorm and went on a Laker with a man driving a great smoking beast called, The Jeep.
The Jeep was a lovely hybrid made out of a 1945 body and 1949 engine and painted a deep flat foresty green. Now this was 1968, so The Jeep was no young thing even then.
But he put forth his best effort and went up hill and down while filled to the brim with college kids going on a Laker, some of them to their first Laker. About three hills in, no matter how hard he thought, he just couldn't make it up one more hill.
Everyone except the driver had to get out of The Jeep. They huffed and they puffed and they pushed The Jeep up the hill, then chased it down before pushing it up the next hill and chasing it down. They did this until they came to a magical place in the woods. There they spread out their blankets, some of them over the liquor bottles and some of them under the baskets of fresh ripe strawberries.
And the Laker began.
The Jeep people were not alone. The woods was filled with other people on Lakers of their own, but if you got lost taking care of business in the dark, all you had to do was cry, "Strawberries! Strawberries!" and you could find your way home. Back to your blanket upon which sat all your friends with their glasses and bottles and a thing called the churchkey.
It was upon returning from one of those trips that the maiden saw the churchkey and in great amazement read the name embossed upon it. "You named your churchkey, Angel?" She laughed.
And the man who drove The Jeep said, very offended, "No! I am The Angel." And that was when the maiden learned the name of her first ever blind date on her first ever Laker on her first ride in The Jeep.
She got her second ride the next day when The Angel called and asked her if she wanted to go see what ducks did in the rain! The Angel loved The Jeep, but he could only drive so far before the floor got too hot for him to keep his foot on the pedal, then he had to stop driving and let it cool down, but the love between him and the maiden didn't cool down until many years later.
We have learned to look at life in segments. Infancy, childhood, adulthood, as if they are each defined by a hard and fast line.
Using years to understand our expectations of people is the way the world has mostly chosen to go, but not necessarily the best.
There is one train of thought that says a child is not ready to go on to first grade until he has lost his baby teeth. I'm not sure I can agree with that. One of my children, who is now a lawyer, lost his first tooth well into his eighth year. He excelled in school, but perhaps his emotional well being might have increased had we held him back.
It is easier for the world to set general standards like people can drive at 16 or vote at 21, or retire at 65 in order for there to be more order, but there is no proof that everyone is ready to do these things at that particular age. We just don't seem to have any other way to determine who is ready in a fair and equitable way.
But we cannot rely entirely on nature either. Children are capable of having children long before they are capable of being parents and taller children can reach many things they are not ready to handle before shorter children who may be entirely ready.
Human beings love to celebrate and anniversaries give them many reasons. It is indeed a coup to keep a child alive year after year, but it is a bigger one to fulfill that child's actual potential at the same time.
The trick is to balance physical and emotional well being so those accomplishments provide happiness or contentment within the human being. That is harder to measure.
Some children learn to smile, not because they are particularly happy, but because it soothes the people around them.
Being resourceful is a very useful skill.
Everybody is looking for themselves.
But nobody wants to see what's really there.
We choose to look for what we want, or need instead.
Too many books. Too many movies. Too much television.
Real vision finds imperfections. That's the real perfection.
Dealing with crazy imperfect selves.
All like me and nobody like me.
That's life.
I go to work, usually 3-4 hours and I come home.
Sometimes my work is boring.
Sometimes it is fulfilling.
Sometimes it is crazy making.
At home I do household chores on a need to routine and everything gets done eventually.
I am exhausted most of the time I am not at work, but I've only been working about ten weeks.
I go to bed early.
I get up early to drink my coffee and play the New York Times Games.
In between working and sleeping I read a little and write a little.
For a woman who has lived three quarters of a century this is not a bad life.
I am still engaged.
Babies are born and grow up until they die.
We spend a good portion of our lives pretending this isn't true, because the pain of losing someone, anyone, can be unbearable.
We make up stories about what happens after death and pretend we know. That helps some people.
We mourn those who we feel die too young, or too painfully. We agonize over those who we feel die needlessly. We even seek revenge for those we think died because of someone else's actions.
But in the end.
We die.
It is part of life.
When, how, why?
That is the subject of every story, book, play, movie and life that exists.
Such a simple, complex thing, those years between birth and death.
What happens at daycare gets shared at home!
My children start in our group about 35 months old. They are learning to use the potty and dress themselves, so patience is a big part of my job.
Meal times are both social and learning times. We just put the food on the plate. Eating it is up to each child. He doesn't have to eat anything, but he has to taste things to get seconds. It is amazing to watch these babies use their forks to shovel in broccoli and green beans as often as they do peaches and pears.
And the glasses are just the right size. If they tip over no one panics. The tipper just goes and gets a paper napkin to mop it up.
Our classroom is kid-sized. There is a trampoline for those with Tigger tendencies. They can bounce and bounce and bounce! Our science center has light tables, flashlights, sorting toys, measuring toys, and rocks covered in letters. There is even an experiment in a big huge jar to keep tabs on.
Our tiny engineers have Legos, and big wooden blocks, tracks, and magnetic wooden blocks to create their colossal inventions.
Our libraries are scattered around the room in baskets and on shelves anywhere a person might need something to read.
We have a quiet corner where you can go to read or rest, or sometimes just let your emotions flow and we have a playground surrounded by a pond filled with swans and geese. There are tricycles and slides and climbing places mixed in with swings and places to play ball. And if the spirit moves you, there are places to run and run and run.
This is a place to grow up curious and free with big people as diplomats and teachers.
I get paid to play!
Of course I do some sweeping up after meals and some wiping down of tables, but mostly my job is to play with the children and I love it.
We swing on a big blue swing and pretend it is our rocket ship, or submarine and the adventures we have are epic! One of our guys is an expert asteroid destroyer and another fights sharks and octopuses, depending on where we are, of course.
They dress me up, comb my hair, paint my face with pretend make-up while wearing beautiful ball gowns and big green rubber boots. The fashion in our class is very eclectic.
We build tracks and trains and play with our sensory boxes filled with dough for hours.
In between I get to read books. Sometimes on the comfy couch, sometimes right in the middle of the room. The informality of our group gives us the freedom to be who we are, whether it is doing puzzles, or playing with markers and glue.
I kiss boo boos, teach people how to apologize for accidentally hurting each other, hold them in my lap, or let them lead me by the hand into the land of three year olds.
I am a surrogate mama and I take my job very seriously. Sometimes there are as many as seven of us with eleven children. Each one of us totally dedicated to the proposition that we are raising the next generation and we want to them to be prepared.
If your mama leaves you with someone while she goes to work, I hope you are with people like us.
My first birthday, that I remember, I turned two!
My great Aunt Lela made me a beautiful lamb cake in a three dimensional cast iron pan and covered it with coconut. It was amazing. Except I discovered I didn't like that flaky dried coconut.
Honestly, I don't really like cake much unless it is very moist and has lots of icing. I don't care for dried out things.
Taste is a strange thing. I suppose we can develop a taste for some things, but our preferences seem to be born with us.
I like butterscotch, caramel, fudge. I am not a fan of fudge made with marshmallow, that dilutes it. I like intensely sweet brown sugar things mixed with butter.
You can leave out the cinnamon and other spices. I also like my flavors intensely untouched by underlying tastes.
My taste in people is very similar. I like intensely passionate people without pretensions. I'm not impressed by window dressings, or empty headedness. A little mystery, a lot of reticence, a ton of thought goes a long way.
I like to think about things, so the things I love need lots of room to be thought about!
Most people never know more than the top twenty percent of me. They are happy with that and I have no need to share more with them, although I come across as caring and sharing, which I am. (With that 20%.)
It is so easy to be kind, but good boundaries keep kindness real.
Neither of my grandmothers grew up being able to vote!
I grew up on politics in my family.
My paternal grandfather was a dyed in the wool Republican and while his methods were often wild, crazy and dubious, his zeal was real. Senator Everett Dirksen was one of his best friends.
My mother was not allowed to work outside the home. That was considered gauche. It meant your husband could not support his family, but she volunteered to work in politics from the time I was in elementary school. That was acceptable.
My coloring paper was leftover old campaign papers.
My slogans were hard core Republican even if I had no idea what they meant or stood for.
I met many Republican politicians and governors during my childhood.
My maternal grandmother was an equally staunch Democrat who worked the polls every single election. She and my great aunt would argue back and forth claiming they negated each other's vote every year.
I was sent out to sell Goldwater. I worked in my grandfather's office when he was in Washington and I have a family photo of all of us grandchildren with my Grandfather and Dirksen.
Now I am more of a Democrat than anything else. I don't fall for the parties of Tricky Dicky, or Trump with their toothy shark-like smiles and sly ways, but I understand that all politics are dubious.
It's just they are the best thing we've got right now in a world that is leaning towards violence and chaos.
The first Halloween I remember was 1955 when I was in first grade.
My mother summoned up all her creative energy and created a costume she was proud to send out into the world! An exemplary example of her ability to make do and make great!
She took the long heavy cushions off of the back of our birch daybed and turned them into hot dog buns, complete with mustard and ketchup. Each one had a strap that was supposed to make wearing them possible.
She dyed my one piece long johns bright red and bought a very large official vinyl Goofy mask for me to wear from Mummert's Drug Store.
I was a hot dog!
It was an experience in blind faith as I was tugged along by my teacher's hand. Upstairs and downstairs, across the playground and down long halls.
With the stalwart faith of a steadfast five year old, I allowed myself to be pulled into this new experience.
And I was hot!
All I could see was the pool of sweat collecting in the nose of the mask before me as I lugged those heavy buns along, sometimes hanging from my arms, sometimes dragging them on the ground.
It was one of the longest walks I can ever remember taking and I saw nothing the whole time except the inside of my own mask filling up with sweat.
I was so proud!
