I live by lists. Can’t help it. Must have one – at least one – every day. Even if all it says on a given day is:
Pet the cat
Check Facebook
Of course, most of my daily lists include reminders to be here or there at a certain time, to make a payment for something or other, to do this or that task as secretary of the local Bahá'í Assembly, to call my daughter about a question related to the children’s theatre company we are starting or about a family matter, to return items to the library, to remind my husband about … (there’s always something), to stop at one or more stores for supplies referenced on a separate shopping list, the one that has a permanent home on the refrigerator. Etc., etc., etc. And here’s the puzzlement.
I love these pesky sounding lists. I really do. And I especially love crossing tasks off as they are completed. My favorite lists are the ones that are unreadable by the end of the day because all the items have been obliterated by heavy lines.
Aaaaaah, what a wonderful feeling of accomplishment!
Or is it actually a symptom of questionable mental health? Is obsessive listmaking a practical tool or a “cunning, baffling and powerful” addiction? (Any of you who have been regular participants in just about any kind of 12-step meeting will recognize that phrase.)
I know what you’re thinking. Come on, Helen, quit exaggerating. And stop trivializing addictions. Listmaking is just good organizational practice. What’s the big deal?
OK, maybe you’re right. After all, I do get a lot done with the help of these long tedious lists, providing I don’t forget where I put them. And there’s my job, which basically requires me to be a Mother Hen listmaker. In order to coordinate both admissions for prospective graduate students in an education department and also the various steps and phases and paperwork necessary for students to properly record and complete all their requirements and eventually graduate, I spend a lot of time organizing, collating, transmitting and filing pieces of paper. Often the job also involves offering a sympathetic ear and an encouraging nudge, whichever is appropriate, to help students keep on track toward their Ph.D.
In other words, a Mother Hen listmaker. And most days, that feels like a perfect fit.
Still, there are indications that maybe I take this listmaking propensity a tad too far. Like the time, many years ago, when we were in the process of buying a house for the first time. I found that moving into a newly purchased house was more complicated than any other moving I had previously done, and seemed to involve more lists. One morning, a few days before the closing, we went out for breakfast and I brought along clean paper and a pen and all my notes and spread them out on the table to try to get them organized. My husband watched me for a few minutes (in wonder or in horror, I don’t know which), and than asked, incredulity dripping from every word, “Are you making a list of your lists?”
I was. I hadn’t thought of it that way, but that’s exactly what I was doing.
Now here’s the reason this topic is on my mind today. Because my love of lists, or whatever it is that makes lists such an essential part of my life, also makes it very hard to enjoy 11 unscheduled days off work. 11 days off, no traveling planned. Just 11 days at home.
That’s what’s happening right now. Our office, basically the whole university, closed at end of day on December 23 and won’t re-open until the morning of January 4. Today is day 5. It’s a Monday morning. Most Monday mornings I have finished writing my blog – with its self-imposed, publicly announced weekly publishing deadline -- the day before, or sometimes even the day before that. This week, despite having had almost nothing pressing to do for days 1 through 4 of this break, here I am on day 5. Monday morning. Just getting started.
Why? Because for an addicted listmaker, sustained freedom from lists is not a pretty sight.
All during December, which is the major crunch time in my job, I dreamed about this break. As I slogged through 113 applications to our doctoral program -- most of them arriving right at deadline time and thus creating an avalanche of paperwork to process -- as I answered phone calls and emails and arranged and labeled files and scanned or saved documents into online folders, hopefully getting all of them into the correct places, and tried to get everything cataloged and communicated and coordinated before December 23 so our faculty could access the information and begin reviewing applicants online while the office is closed ….
Gads, that was a long sentence!
Anyway, you get the idea. I was very busy. And the thought of a beautiful 11-day break with no trips planned, no major events happening, lots of time to lie on the sofa reading books and watching movies, seemed like heaven on earth.
Sure, there were things to be done during that time. The incipient children’s theatre company urgently needed attention, a small home renovation project is in process, many hours of ice time would be available for skating practice, a couple of Bahá'í meetings were scheduled, there would be ordinary household tasks to manage and grandkids to play with, and of course, two blog deadlines. But ordinarily all of that and more must be accomplished around a full-time work schedule. Without having to go to work, the rest would be a snap. Right?
Maybe.
I left my office last Wednesday feeling pretty pleased with myself. Everything was done and I was able to walk out the door with a peaceful mind. After work I went to the library and stocked up on books and movies. And of course, made a list of everything that I needed to do, at some point or other, during the break. Not a schedule, mind you. Just a list. Just a whenever-I-could-fit-it-in-around-sofa-time list.
After a bit of shopping early in the day on Thursday when stores were still open and some food preparation for the duration, I spent virtually the rest of that day and all of the next doing … absolutely … nothing.
Or at least, what feels like nothing to me.
I didn’t write anything. I didn’t organize anything. I didn’t read anything except novels and email. I didn’t cross anything off on a list. And it felt pretty good, for a while. Until about mid-day Friday, when a strange lassitude set in. By then I’d had plenty of rest and could easily have, if not dived, at least tiptoed into a couple of the tasks that would have to be addressed at some point during the break. And I’d had enough rest to start feeling a bit bored. And I could have put on real clothes and gone out for some recreational grandparenting. AND all of these options sounded very appealing to my thoroughly relaxed brain.
But did I do any of that?
Nope.
I just burrowed deeper into the sofa. It seemed my body had forgotten how to move.
Maybe I was having listmaker withdrawal symptoms. You know, crashing. At any rate, when Saturday morning came and the world around me came back to life, so did I. Hooray, there were places to go, things to do, people to see (what song lyrics am I channeling here???), and I was energized once again as I charged out the door, tightly clutching a list for that day, ready to conquer the universe by crossing off items, one by one.
Now it's today. And just a few minutes ago, after writing most of the above text, I walked into the kitchen, unashamedly picked up my current list, rummaged in the drawer for a yellow highlighter, and swiped it across every item that needs to be done today. And didn’t think a thing about it until after I came back to my computer and re-read what I’d written up to this point.
So here’s the deal: if any of you can relate to this, and are willing to admit it, I propose we start a new 12-step group, Listmakers Anonymous. I’ve been involved in starting other recovery groups so I know just what to do. First, we make a list …
-30-
Monday, December 28, 2009
Sunday, December 20, 2009
My Christmas Tree
One morning when I was six years old I woke up and saw a Christmas tree standing at the foot of my bed. Not a big tree, not a little tree, a medium-sized tree, very green, very full. Its only decorations were shiny colored balls – red and yellow, blue and green – and silver tinsel draping it from top to bottom. It stood bright and beautiful against a backdrop of complete darkness.
My tree.
Mom had said no every time I asked, no, I could not have a Christmas tree. We were Jewish, we didn’t celebrate Christmas, except for the stocking she would hang in the living room and fill with nuts and chocolate and oranges for me to find on December 25. Like a lot of Jewish parents, she let a little bit of Christmas into our lives. Stocking, yes. A tree, never.
But a tree was what I wanted, and here it was, an unexpected gift. My tree.
Then I really woke up. No tree. It was only a dream, an especially vivid, amazingly tangible dream.
After that year I decided to accept the fact that I would never have a Christmas tree. As the only Jewish student in my grade school, I liked answering other kids’ questions about Hanukkah. Being different, unique, had its compensations. I could live quite well without Christmas, thank you.
When I was 17 years old and just graduated from high school, I spent a couple hours with a fellow graduate learning about the Bahá'í Faith. Here at last was an explanation for the station of Christ that made sense to me, that seemed logical and likely to be true. This and other aspects of the new religion attracted me, beckoned further study, and several months later, to my parents’ horror, I signed a little card and officially identified myself as a Bahá'í.
Seven years later I married a fellow Bahá'í whose family was Catholic. They had great fun watching me participate in Christmas for the first time. I enjoyed it, too, but after a few years found it was no longer fun. There’s a kind of “have to” frenzy surrounding Christmas that seems normal to people who grow up with it but looked crazy to me watching it from the outside, and felt even crazier after a few years on the inside. I loved my husband’s family but just couldn’t love Christmas. We stopped participating, and since we didn’t celebrate Christmas in our own home, I was done with the whole thing.
I never forgot the tree in my dream, however, the tree I wanted as a child but could not have. The picture of it in my mind remained clear and vibrant. Not a big tree, not a little tree, a medium-sized tree, very green, very full. Its only decorations were shiny colored balls – red and yellow, blue and green – and silver tinsel draping it from top to bottom. It stood bright and beautiful against a backdrop of complete darkness.
I told my husband about the dream. He said he wished he could see my tree, it sounded so special.
My mother and I had a difficult relationship. She wanted so much to be the perfect mother, because she had never had one of her own, at least not one she could remember. My grandmother had been killed in a robbery when Mom was less than a year old. She was raised by a loving father whom she adored, but she also suffered from the stern influence of her mother’s sister and her much older brothers’ abusive attempts at co-parenting. She was sure her life would have been wonderful if her mother had lived. Without a real mother, or the up-and-down experience of an actual mother-daughter relationship, she envisioned a perfect mother. When she became one herself, she wanted to be perfect, too.
But in order to be a perfect mother one must have a perfect child, a child that proves ones perfection to the world. I didn’t fill that bill. Mine was a strong-willed-ever-questioning-always-fighting-for-independence personality that she described in mostly negative adjectives – stubborn, mean, selfish, cold. I could never be the perfect child who would allow her to be the perfect mother.
She died on December 19, 1990. My sister called a couple days before to tell us Mom had slipped into the expected coma so that we could get to St. Louis before the end. I imagined myself sitting with my mother at her bedside to pray and maybe, finally, find a bond with her. Instead I stood in the doorway to her bedroom and watched as her body struggled to breathe. A coma was a much more active and strenuous event than I had anticipated. Her soul was struggling to let go and move on. It felt wrong to intrude on such a private experience. Or maybe I was just afraid, even then, of being unable to meet my mother’s needs, of being the wrong kind of daughter.
After the funeral, my husband and I stopped by his mother’s place to stay overnight before continuing our drive home. She had been widowed a couple years earlier and had moved into an apartment. The family’s Christmas had migrated to her daughter’s farm house a few miles outside of town, and the tree in that house had become the family tree, decorated with their traditional supply of much handled Santa Clauses and homemade baubles.
There was also a Christmas tree in my mother-in-law’s apartment. She told us that she hadn’t really wanted one, but her daughter had insisted and installed it there. When we arrived I was very tired and hardly noticed it sitting in the picture window in her living room. We visited a bit, then went to bed. The apartment had a guest bedroom, but I told my husband that I wanted to sleep alone in the living room, since it was likely that I would wake up often, probably cry again, maybe pull out my notebook and write to continue processing my mother’s death.
For a couple of hours I slept on the couch, my face pressed against its back, wearily oblivious to the rest of the room. Then I woke up and turned over to face the picture window and looked for the first time at the tree that was standing there.
Not a big tree, not a little tree, a medium-sized tree, very green, very full. Its only decorations were shiny colored balls – red and yellow, blue and green – and silver tinsel draping it from top to bottom. It stood bright and beautiful against a backdrop of complete darkness.
I recognized it immediately. It was my tree. The tree of my dream. The tree I had wanted so much as a child. 39 years later, I was seeing it again. But now it was real.
And I knew that my mother had found the perfect time to give it to me.
-30-
My tree.
Mom had said no every time I asked, no, I could not have a Christmas tree. We were Jewish, we didn’t celebrate Christmas, except for the stocking she would hang in the living room and fill with nuts and chocolate and oranges for me to find on December 25. Like a lot of Jewish parents, she let a little bit of Christmas into our lives. Stocking, yes. A tree, never.
But a tree was what I wanted, and here it was, an unexpected gift. My tree.
Then I really woke up. No tree. It was only a dream, an especially vivid, amazingly tangible dream.
After that year I decided to accept the fact that I would never have a Christmas tree. As the only Jewish student in my grade school, I liked answering other kids’ questions about Hanukkah. Being different, unique, had its compensations. I could live quite well without Christmas, thank you.
When I was 17 years old and just graduated from high school, I spent a couple hours with a fellow graduate learning about the Bahá'í Faith. Here at last was an explanation for the station of Christ that made sense to me, that seemed logical and likely to be true. This and other aspects of the new religion attracted me, beckoned further study, and several months later, to my parents’ horror, I signed a little card and officially identified myself as a Bahá'í.
Seven years later I married a fellow Bahá'í whose family was Catholic. They had great fun watching me participate in Christmas for the first time. I enjoyed it, too, but after a few years found it was no longer fun. There’s a kind of “have to” frenzy surrounding Christmas that seems normal to people who grow up with it but looked crazy to me watching it from the outside, and felt even crazier after a few years on the inside. I loved my husband’s family but just couldn’t love Christmas. We stopped participating, and since we didn’t celebrate Christmas in our own home, I was done with the whole thing.
I never forgot the tree in my dream, however, the tree I wanted as a child but could not have. The picture of it in my mind remained clear and vibrant. Not a big tree, not a little tree, a medium-sized tree, very green, very full. Its only decorations were shiny colored balls – red and yellow, blue and green – and silver tinsel draping it from top to bottom. It stood bright and beautiful against a backdrop of complete darkness.
I told my husband about the dream. He said he wished he could see my tree, it sounded so special.
My mother and I had a difficult relationship. She wanted so much to be the perfect mother, because she had never had one of her own, at least not one she could remember. My grandmother had been killed in a robbery when Mom was less than a year old. She was raised by a loving father whom she adored, but she also suffered from the stern influence of her mother’s sister and her much older brothers’ abusive attempts at co-parenting. She was sure her life would have been wonderful if her mother had lived. Without a real mother, or the up-and-down experience of an actual mother-daughter relationship, she envisioned a perfect mother. When she became one herself, she wanted to be perfect, too.
But in order to be a perfect mother one must have a perfect child, a child that proves ones perfection to the world. I didn’t fill that bill. Mine was a strong-willed-ever-questioning-always-fighting-for-independence personality that she described in mostly negative adjectives – stubborn, mean, selfish, cold. I could never be the perfect child who would allow her to be the perfect mother.
She died on December 19, 1990. My sister called a couple days before to tell us Mom had slipped into the expected coma so that we could get to St. Louis before the end. I imagined myself sitting with my mother at her bedside to pray and maybe, finally, find a bond with her. Instead I stood in the doorway to her bedroom and watched as her body struggled to breathe. A coma was a much more active and strenuous event than I had anticipated. Her soul was struggling to let go and move on. It felt wrong to intrude on such a private experience. Or maybe I was just afraid, even then, of being unable to meet my mother’s needs, of being the wrong kind of daughter.
After the funeral, my husband and I stopped by his mother’s place to stay overnight before continuing our drive home. She had been widowed a couple years earlier and had moved into an apartment. The family’s Christmas had migrated to her daughter’s farm house a few miles outside of town, and the tree in that house had become the family tree, decorated with their traditional supply of much handled Santa Clauses and homemade baubles.
There was also a Christmas tree in my mother-in-law’s apartment. She told us that she hadn’t really wanted one, but her daughter had insisted and installed it there. When we arrived I was very tired and hardly noticed it sitting in the picture window in her living room. We visited a bit, then went to bed. The apartment had a guest bedroom, but I told my husband that I wanted to sleep alone in the living room, since it was likely that I would wake up often, probably cry again, maybe pull out my notebook and write to continue processing my mother’s death.
For a couple of hours I slept on the couch, my face pressed against its back, wearily oblivious to the rest of the room. Then I woke up and turned over to face the picture window and looked for the first time at the tree that was standing there.
Not a big tree, not a little tree, a medium-sized tree, very green, very full. Its only decorations were shiny colored balls – red and yellow, blue and green – and silver tinsel draping it from top to bottom. It stood bright and beautiful against a backdrop of complete darkness.
I recognized it immediately. It was my tree. The tree of my dream. The tree I had wanted so much as a child. 39 years later, I was seeing it again. But now it was real.
And I knew that my mother had found the perfect time to give it to me.
-30-
Sunday, December 13, 2009
Blow out the candles
I wasn’t paying much attention to my birthday last week and then my daughter sent me a greeting on Facebook and blew my cover. Facebook is amazing. A wonderful cascade of birthday wishes came pouring in from friends who saw her post, and my previously heedless brain started churning.
See, it’s like this: before the Facebook surprise I wasn’t paying much attention to my birthday. Partly because this is an especially busy time at work and that’s taking up a big chunk of my attention, but mostly because I didn’t want to think about my new age.
64.
64 years old? Me? Naaah! Can’t believe it. Don’t feel it. Must be a mistake.
Because it’s going the wrong direction. I’m getting younger, not older.
Lest you think I’m also getting slightly unhinged, let me quickly acknowledge that there are just too many proofs that despite my subjective opinion, it’s indubitably obvious that I really am 64. I can remember having a black dial telephone and a party line, and not knowing what a pizza was, or a television, or a self-service elevator, and learning to type on a manual typewriter before electric ones (let alone computers) had even been invented, and hearing about Kennedy’s assassination while walking to class during my college freshman year … etc. etc. etc.
And of course it’s pretty normal to look in the mirror and see a senior citizen face and wonder who in the heck that old lady is. “Can’t be me, I still don’t feel grown up.” Probably most of us have experienced that kind of dissonance. Whereas I’m talking about something much more specific and particular to my life at this moment.
You know those assessments people get that tell them their physical age and whether it’s different from their chronological age? Sometimes the results say they have the body of a person 15 years older or 20 years younger. I haven’t had such an assessment, but definitely feel like I’m getting physically younger. I even said that in a conversation a couple months ago, a slip-of-the-tongue kind of remark: “I was older then” referring to a time a few years ago.
The guy I was talking with didn’t think I was cracking up, though, because he’d heard similar sentiments from other friends. Friends who, like me, had adopted a plant-based diet.
If you’re really passionate about chicken or steak or cheese and think vegans are actually intergalactic aliens in disguise, you should probably stop reading this blog right now. Because while I’m not about to tell you what to do, I am going to talk about what I did and why and what’s happened because of it. Take it or leave it. This is my story and I’m stickin’ to it.
Recently my daughter published an excellent blog describing the journey she and her family have taken along the nutrition highway, a journey that paved my own way despite my initial resistance to joining them whenever urged. Buy organic? No way, too expensive. Eat hummous? Yech, forget it. Cook meals that require a lot of chopping instead of just opening a box? Who has time for that? The only thing I agreed about was avoiding sugar, because my diabetes demanded that concession. But I certainly wasn’t willing to also forgo artificial sweeteners.
Like a lot of people, I thought I was doing a pretty good job by eating a little bit less of this or tad more of that. The golden mean vs. radical extremism. So why was I gaining weight, topping 200 pounds, despite getting a fair amount of exercise at the gym and biking to work for at least half of each year? And why were most of my blood glucose numbers registering over 100 points higher than the top margin of the safe zone? And why was I feeling so bad so often?
OK, that last question isn’t fair, since the answer wasn’t diet, at least directly, although I’m sure it was a major contributing factor. The answer, as I finally learned almost three years ago, was that I had a gallbladder filled with cancer as well as the more usual gallstones.
The cancer was discovered during routine surgery to remove the offending gallbladder, and it surprised the you-know-what out of my doctor. I’ve since learned that there are less than 10,000 cases of gallbladder cancer in the U.S. every year, compared to close to 200,000 cases of breast cancer. But cancer is cancer, an oddball variety notwithstanding, so for the next six months I lived in oncology world, where the typical fun activities are major surgery, chemo, radiation, and spending most of your life lying on the sofa.
Since my October 12th blog already talked about how this cancer experience led to a major lifestyle change which resulted in a big weight loss, I’m going to skip forward, or rather back, to today’s subject: getting younger while getting older. Because I’m pretty sure that if I took one of those age assessments now, it would tell me that my physical age is closer to 44 than 64.
At least, that’s how I feel.
And the reason for this wonderful and unexpected development has to be my new plant-based diet, because that’s the only thing I changed. As previously noted, I already was getting at least some deliberate exercise. I hadn’t had a cigarette since 1984. And I couldn’t stop drinking alcohol since I’d never started. So I have to give credit where credit is due.
I’ve also learned a few things along the way. I’ve learned that I’d rather pay for organic chemical-free food now than for serious illness and general yucky health later, which I no longer assume is a natural and unavoidable component of aging. I’ve learned that sticking to a plant-based diet has caused unexpected changes in my food preferences; that I like stuff, hummous included, which I used to find unappealing or worse. I’ve learned that natural sweeteners like agave nectar or sucanat not only sweeten but are even beneficial.
I also found that a plant-based diet tends to include very few refined foods, which is a good way to avoid many carcinogens, while at the same time it fills ones body with mostly unrefined foods that require a lot more calories to digest.
So here I am at 64, with more energy and strength and general well being, not to mention a better figure, than I had when I really was 44. Hence my neurotic desire to deny the whole thing and –
Wait a minute. I could do that. Heck, Jack Benny did it. He stopped at 39. Never got a day older. So maybe I could just sort of sneak back to 44 when nobody’s looking and settle there for the duration, however long, or short, that may be.
Except for the indisputable fact that people who really are 44 would not have been born when Jack Benny was a TV star. Might not even know who he was.
Curses. Foiled again!
-30-
See, it’s like this: before the Facebook surprise I wasn’t paying much attention to my birthday. Partly because this is an especially busy time at work and that’s taking up a big chunk of my attention, but mostly because I didn’t want to think about my new age.
64.
64 years old? Me? Naaah! Can’t believe it. Don’t feel it. Must be a mistake.
Because it’s going the wrong direction. I’m getting younger, not older.
Lest you think I’m also getting slightly unhinged, let me quickly acknowledge that there are just too many proofs that despite my subjective opinion, it’s indubitably obvious that I really am 64. I can remember having a black dial telephone and a party line, and not knowing what a pizza was, or a television, or a self-service elevator, and learning to type on a manual typewriter before electric ones (let alone computers) had even been invented, and hearing about Kennedy’s assassination while walking to class during my college freshman year … etc. etc. etc.
And of course it’s pretty normal to look in the mirror and see a senior citizen face and wonder who in the heck that old lady is. “Can’t be me, I still don’t feel grown up.” Probably most of us have experienced that kind of dissonance. Whereas I’m talking about something much more specific and particular to my life at this moment.
You know those assessments people get that tell them their physical age and whether it’s different from their chronological age? Sometimes the results say they have the body of a person 15 years older or 20 years younger. I haven’t had such an assessment, but definitely feel like I’m getting physically younger. I even said that in a conversation a couple months ago, a slip-of-the-tongue kind of remark: “I was older then” referring to a time a few years ago.
The guy I was talking with didn’t think I was cracking up, though, because he’d heard similar sentiments from other friends. Friends who, like me, had adopted a plant-based diet.
If you’re really passionate about chicken or steak or cheese and think vegans are actually intergalactic aliens in disguise, you should probably stop reading this blog right now. Because while I’m not about to tell you what to do, I am going to talk about what I did and why and what’s happened because of it. Take it or leave it. This is my story and I’m stickin’ to it.
Recently my daughter published an excellent blog describing the journey she and her family have taken along the nutrition highway, a journey that paved my own way despite my initial resistance to joining them whenever urged. Buy organic? No way, too expensive. Eat hummous? Yech, forget it. Cook meals that require a lot of chopping instead of just opening a box? Who has time for that? The only thing I agreed about was avoiding sugar, because my diabetes demanded that concession. But I certainly wasn’t willing to also forgo artificial sweeteners.
Like a lot of people, I thought I was doing a pretty good job by eating a little bit less of this or tad more of that. The golden mean vs. radical extremism. So why was I gaining weight, topping 200 pounds, despite getting a fair amount of exercise at the gym and biking to work for at least half of each year? And why were most of my blood glucose numbers registering over 100 points higher than the top margin of the safe zone? And why was I feeling so bad so often?
OK, that last question isn’t fair, since the answer wasn’t diet, at least directly, although I’m sure it was a major contributing factor. The answer, as I finally learned almost three years ago, was that I had a gallbladder filled with cancer as well as the more usual gallstones.
The cancer was discovered during routine surgery to remove the offending gallbladder, and it surprised the you-know-what out of my doctor. I’ve since learned that there are less than 10,000 cases of gallbladder cancer in the U.S. every year, compared to close to 200,000 cases of breast cancer. But cancer is cancer, an oddball variety notwithstanding, so for the next six months I lived in oncology world, where the typical fun activities are major surgery, chemo, radiation, and spending most of your life lying on the sofa.
Since my October 12th blog already talked about how this cancer experience led to a major lifestyle change which resulted in a big weight loss, I’m going to skip forward, or rather back, to today’s subject: getting younger while getting older. Because I’m pretty sure that if I took one of those age assessments now, it would tell me that my physical age is closer to 44 than 64.
At least, that’s how I feel.
And the reason for this wonderful and unexpected development has to be my new plant-based diet, because that’s the only thing I changed. As previously noted, I already was getting at least some deliberate exercise. I hadn’t had a cigarette since 1984. And I couldn’t stop drinking alcohol since I’d never started. So I have to give credit where credit is due.
I’ve also learned a few things along the way. I’ve learned that I’d rather pay for organic chemical-free food now than for serious illness and general yucky health later, which I no longer assume is a natural and unavoidable component of aging. I’ve learned that sticking to a plant-based diet has caused unexpected changes in my food preferences; that I like stuff, hummous included, which I used to find unappealing or worse. I’ve learned that natural sweeteners like agave nectar or sucanat not only sweeten but are even beneficial.
I also found that a plant-based diet tends to include very few refined foods, which is a good way to avoid many carcinogens, while at the same time it fills ones body with mostly unrefined foods that require a lot more calories to digest.
So here I am at 64, with more energy and strength and general well being, not to mention a better figure, than I had when I really was 44. Hence my neurotic desire to deny the whole thing and –
Wait a minute. I could do that. Heck, Jack Benny did it. He stopped at 39. Never got a day older. So maybe I could just sort of sneak back to 44 when nobody’s looking and settle there for the duration, however long, or short, that may be.
Except for the indisputable fact that people who really are 44 would not have been born when Jack Benny was a TV star. Might not even know who he was.
Curses. Foiled again!
-30-
Sunday, December 6, 2009
Pome for a day
OK, boys and girls, I’m going to have to cheat a bit tonight. My creative juices were all used up trying to correctly decipher the installation instructions for a new DVD/VCR combo. And the amazing part is that I did! Decipher, that is. Correctly even. A true miracle, believe me.
Getting a new piece of equipment to install and learn how to operate was the last thing that I wanted – well, maybe not THE last thing, but pretty close. It was necessary, though, because our old VCR has quit recording, and since I can’t live without seeing “So You Think You Can Dance” and won’t be home this Tuesday night to watch it in real time, I was forced – really, that’s the correct verb when obsession is involved – to spend way too many hours this weekend researching and questioning and shopping around to figure out what to do.
My first rather naïve idea was to just buy another VCR, but it appears that the VCR has gone the way of the dinosaur. My exploration finally led me to two choices: a one-time expenditure for an on-sale DVD/VCR combo or an added monthly cable fee for DVR service. Since my husband never wants to record anything and “Dance” is the only show I absolutely must see (and really about the only one I ever purposely sit down to watch), the idea of a new monthly expense wasn’t appealing.
Until I brought the new machine home and looked at the instructions, that is. And was immediately absolutely sure that I’d never be able to follow them. Since that’s what I thought, it almost became true. Knowing with absolute certainty that I was hopelessly out of my league, I called a friend for help. He couldn’t come over but expressed faith that I could figure it out by myself. Somehow that helped me feel a tad more confident, just enough to think maybe he was right and to begin again and believe it would work. Which is probably why it did.
So it seems appropriate to share something I wrote many years ago that expresses a large part of what I had learned from a twelve-step recovery process (which I’ll talk about some other time). I wrote it as a presentation piece when my daughter and I were co-hosting a writer’s open mic (another topic for a future blog). It’s called “I think” and I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed performing it. Read it out loud. It almost sounds like a real “pome" that way!
I think, therefore I feel,
Because what I think is what feels real,
Even if it ain’t.
Saint or sinner,
Loser or winner,
Sad and blue or in the pink,
It all depends on what I think.
I think, therefore I feel.
I change my thought, and just like magic
I stop feeling tragic.
Just like that.
In no time, flat.
Sometimes a thought is buried deep,
A thought I keep
Guarded and hidden,
Till it pops up unbidden,
Like a garden weed.
But if I plant a new seed,
A new thought,
Nourish it, prune it, keep it safe from draught,
In time it will bear fruit,
New feelings that replace the old
And let me finally feel kind or calm or strong or bold
Or whatever I could never feel before.
It’s like walking through a door,
From darkness into light,
From bondage into flight.
I think therefore I feel.
And since what I feel follows what I think,
When my thinking changes, in a blink,
So does what I feel.
Such a wonderful deal.
-30-
Getting a new piece of equipment to install and learn how to operate was the last thing that I wanted – well, maybe not THE last thing, but pretty close. It was necessary, though, because our old VCR has quit recording, and since I can’t live without seeing “So You Think You Can Dance” and won’t be home this Tuesday night to watch it in real time, I was forced – really, that’s the correct verb when obsession is involved – to spend way too many hours this weekend researching and questioning and shopping around to figure out what to do.
My first rather naïve idea was to just buy another VCR, but it appears that the VCR has gone the way of the dinosaur. My exploration finally led me to two choices: a one-time expenditure for an on-sale DVD/VCR combo or an added monthly cable fee for DVR service. Since my husband never wants to record anything and “Dance” is the only show I absolutely must see (and really about the only one I ever purposely sit down to watch), the idea of a new monthly expense wasn’t appealing.
Until I brought the new machine home and looked at the instructions, that is. And was immediately absolutely sure that I’d never be able to follow them. Since that’s what I thought, it almost became true. Knowing with absolute certainty that I was hopelessly out of my league, I called a friend for help. He couldn’t come over but expressed faith that I could figure it out by myself. Somehow that helped me feel a tad more confident, just enough to think maybe he was right and to begin again and believe it would work. Which is probably why it did.
So it seems appropriate to share something I wrote many years ago that expresses a large part of what I had learned from a twelve-step recovery process (which I’ll talk about some other time). I wrote it as a presentation piece when my daughter and I were co-hosting a writer’s open mic (another topic for a future blog). It’s called “I think” and I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed performing it. Read it out loud. It almost sounds like a real “pome" that way!
I think, therefore I feel,
Because what I think is what feels real,
Even if it ain’t.
Saint or sinner,
Loser or winner,
Sad and blue or in the pink,
It all depends on what I think.
I think, therefore I feel.
I change my thought, and just like magic
I stop feeling tragic.
Just like that.
In no time, flat.
Sometimes a thought is buried deep,
A thought I keep
Guarded and hidden,
Till it pops up unbidden,
Like a garden weed.
But if I plant a new seed,
A new thought,
Nourish it, prune it, keep it safe from draught,
In time it will bear fruit,
New feelings that replace the old
And let me finally feel kind or calm or strong or bold
Or whatever I could never feel before.
It’s like walking through a door,
From darkness into light,
From bondage into flight.
I think therefore I feel.
And since what I feel follows what I think,
When my thinking changes, in a blink,
So does what I feel.
Such a wonderful deal.
-30-
Sunday, November 29, 2009
If it's all the same to you ...
If the flowers of a garden were all of one color, the effect would be monotonous to the eye; but if the colors are variegated, it is most pleasing and wonderful. The difference in adornment of color and capacity of reflection among the flowers gives the garden its beauty and charm. Therefore, although we are of different individualities, different in ideas and of various fragrances, let us strive like flowers of the same divine garden to live together in harmony.
That quotation comes from one of the many speeches given by ‘Abdu’l-Bahá during his 1911-12 travels in the United States. He was talking about unity in diversity, a central teaching of the Bahá'í Faith. I like his analogy. It’s easy to picture a garden where all the flowers are, say, red and picture another garden where the flowers are red and purple and blue and yellow and white and orange, and to know that most of us would rather look at the second garden.
Or would we?
The idea for this week’s blog came from two sources: a novel I finished last week, and Thanksgiving. The novel is A Walk Through Fire, William Cobb’s fictional portrayal of the backstory to the ragged beginnings of the U.S. Civil Rights Movement that challenged legal racism and eventually led to the election of a dark skinned president with an African name, an event that was beyond unimaginable in 1960.
I was intrigued by the reasoning of the book’s White characters who believe that anything, even murder, is totally justified when necessary to “protect our way of life.” It’s easy to see these characters’ thinking as evil or stupid but the way they see it is simply self-defense against the threat of change. Throughout the novel many of Cobb’s characters, both Black and White, argue about or warn against or in some other way reject the developing move toward legal equality out of fear that it will take away what they already have and give them something different that they either know or fear they will not like.
Without trying to oversimplify an extremely complex subject, at the moment I’m interested in only one question: why are people so attracted to sameness? Why do we so often want to do things the same way as they’ve been done before? Why do so many of us on this small planet find such security in sameness that we completely reject others who are unlike us? Why does this fear of difference or love of sameness or whatever it is afflict humankind throughout history in every part of the world?
OK, I guess those were four questions if you want to get technical about it. And they are certainly not new or unique questions, they just happen to be what was on my mind this week.
So where does Thanksgiving come in? Right here.
“Tradition” from Fiddler on the Roof would be a good theme song for the Thanksgiving-Christmas-New Year’s part of our calendar, because so much homage is paid to preserving old patterns of celebration, returning to former times, and keeping everything the same, as if sameness were the key to harmony and love and faith. I don’t believe it is. Neither is constant change, of course, that would be chaos, but an appreciation for the value of change needs to balance the prevailing wisdom that a good holiday is a traditional holiday. Change, after all, is the pre-eminent condition of life.
This phenomenal world will not remain in an unchanging condition even for a short while. Second after second it undergoes change and transformation. Every foundation will finally become collapsed; every glory and splendor will at last vanish and disappear, but the Kingdom of God is eternal and the heavenly sovereignty and majesty will stand firm, everlasting. Hence in the estimation of a wise man the mat in the Kingdom of God is preferable to the throne of the government of the world.
That thought also came from ‘Abdu’l-Bahá. And again at the risk of sounding simplistic, I see this principle operating even in something as mundane as a Thanksgiving dinner. In this case, it was the dinner I enjoyed at my daughter’s home. About the only tradition that we honored was the fact that we came together to eat food.
It was a potluck meal that included two kinds of chili, Korean rice noodles with vegetables, homemade Chinese dumplings, corn muffins, fruit, rice, veggies, and an experimental mushroom-pineapple concoction. No sweet potatoes. No cranberries. No stuffing. No mashed potatoes or gravy. No Cool Whip-Jello mold. And turkey (ground, not carved) only made an appearance in one of the chili recipes. The group included family and friends, young and old, American and Asian, people who were already well acquainted and others who first met that day, a truck driver, a one-man-band performer, a composer, College of Education doctoral students, a home schooling mom. We played Uno, learned about African drumming, discussed educational issues, spent an inordinate amount of time and brain power deciphering a complicated logic puzzle, and sometimes laughed till we cried “uncle.”
Nobody watched a football game on TV. The only pumpkins in the house were painted ones, compliments of my grandsons. We plopped the food on the kitchen table in no particular order and sat down to eat on any chair or piece of floor we could find. Sameness, 0. Unity in diversity, definitely a 10. Maybe even a little piece of the Kingdom of God.
Really, an altogether lovely afternoon that --
Wait a minute. Did I say there was no stuffing? No? Stuffing? NO STUFFING???? Now that’s going too far. There are some things that should never change!
-30-
That quotation comes from one of the many speeches given by ‘Abdu’l-Bahá during his 1911-12 travels in the United States. He was talking about unity in diversity, a central teaching of the Bahá'í Faith. I like his analogy. It’s easy to picture a garden where all the flowers are, say, red and picture another garden where the flowers are red and purple and blue and yellow and white and orange, and to know that most of us would rather look at the second garden.
Or would we?
The idea for this week’s blog came from two sources: a novel I finished last week, and Thanksgiving. The novel is A Walk Through Fire, William Cobb’s fictional portrayal of the backstory to the ragged beginnings of the U.S. Civil Rights Movement that challenged legal racism and eventually led to the election of a dark skinned president with an African name, an event that was beyond unimaginable in 1960.
I was intrigued by the reasoning of the book’s White characters who believe that anything, even murder, is totally justified when necessary to “protect our way of life.” It’s easy to see these characters’ thinking as evil or stupid but the way they see it is simply self-defense against the threat of change. Throughout the novel many of Cobb’s characters, both Black and White, argue about or warn against or in some other way reject the developing move toward legal equality out of fear that it will take away what they already have and give them something different that they either know or fear they will not like.
Without trying to oversimplify an extremely complex subject, at the moment I’m interested in only one question: why are people so attracted to sameness? Why do we so often want to do things the same way as they’ve been done before? Why do so many of us on this small planet find such security in sameness that we completely reject others who are unlike us? Why does this fear of difference or love of sameness or whatever it is afflict humankind throughout history in every part of the world?
OK, I guess those were four questions if you want to get technical about it. And they are certainly not new or unique questions, they just happen to be what was on my mind this week.
So where does Thanksgiving come in? Right here.
“Tradition” from Fiddler on the Roof would be a good theme song for the Thanksgiving-Christmas-New Year’s part of our calendar, because so much homage is paid to preserving old patterns of celebration, returning to former times, and keeping everything the same, as if sameness were the key to harmony and love and faith. I don’t believe it is. Neither is constant change, of course, that would be chaos, but an appreciation for the value of change needs to balance the prevailing wisdom that a good holiday is a traditional holiday. Change, after all, is the pre-eminent condition of life.
This phenomenal world will not remain in an unchanging condition even for a short while. Second after second it undergoes change and transformation. Every foundation will finally become collapsed; every glory and splendor will at last vanish and disappear, but the Kingdom of God is eternal and the heavenly sovereignty and majesty will stand firm, everlasting. Hence in the estimation of a wise man the mat in the Kingdom of God is preferable to the throne of the government of the world.
That thought also came from ‘Abdu’l-Bahá. And again at the risk of sounding simplistic, I see this principle operating even in something as mundane as a Thanksgiving dinner. In this case, it was the dinner I enjoyed at my daughter’s home. About the only tradition that we honored was the fact that we came together to eat food.
It was a potluck meal that included two kinds of chili, Korean rice noodles with vegetables, homemade Chinese dumplings, corn muffins, fruit, rice, veggies, and an experimental mushroom-pineapple concoction. No sweet potatoes. No cranberries. No stuffing. No mashed potatoes or gravy. No Cool Whip-Jello mold. And turkey (ground, not carved) only made an appearance in one of the chili recipes. The group included family and friends, young and old, American and Asian, people who were already well acquainted and others who first met that day, a truck driver, a one-man-band performer, a composer, College of Education doctoral students, a home schooling mom. We played Uno, learned about African drumming, discussed educational issues, spent an inordinate amount of time and brain power deciphering a complicated logic puzzle, and sometimes laughed till we cried “uncle.”
Nobody watched a football game on TV. The only pumpkins in the house were painted ones, compliments of my grandsons. We plopped the food on the kitchen table in no particular order and sat down to eat on any chair or piece of floor we could find. Sameness, 0. Unity in diversity, definitely a 10. Maybe even a little piece of the Kingdom of God.
Really, an altogether lovely afternoon that --
Wait a minute. Did I say there was no stuffing? No? Stuffing? NO STUFFING???? Now that’s going too far. There are some things that should never change!
-30-
Sunday, November 22, 2009
Pizza tales
The other day at work a student from Egypt told me that ordering a pizza for a home meal is not a common experience in his country, which started me thinking about pizza and how ingrained it is in our national life style, and that got me thinking about my personal history with it. Kind of a circular history, since I’ve pretty much ended up back where I started.
And where is that? Since you asked, I’ll tell you.
Some of my younger readers (do I have any of those?) might be surprised to know that even someone (ahem) as young as me can remember a time before pizza became our unofficial national food. According to the Ultimate Authority (also known as Wikopedia), pizza started to become a common American food in the mid 1950’s. Not in Springfield, Illinois, though. It must have been around 1954 that my Aunt Dora and her daughter came to visit from St. Louis, Missouri, and were absolutely scandalized to learn that not only did our town not have any place from which to order this pseudo-Italian delicacy, but that my mother had no idea what a pizza was. No, wait, I must be remembering this wrong. Not about my mother, about the pizza availability situation. We had to have at least one pizzeria in town by then, maybe a tiny shop on a dark corner in an otherwise empty part of town where we had never ventured, because somehow Aunt Dora found it and brought pizza into our home for the first time. Our reaction? Yech! We did not like it, not at all.
I felt like the main character in Green Eggs and Ham, even though that book hadn’t yet been published. “I do not like this pizza pie, I do not like it, that’s no lie. I don’t like pizza hot or cold. I don’t like pizza new or old. I do not like it with a pop. I do not like it so please stop. I do not like it, Auntie dear. You can have the rest. Here!”
Eventually my mother decided that since most of the country was becoming pizza crazed, maybe the stuff couldn’t be all bad. She wasn’t about to spend money ordering it ready made, though. Instead she would go to the grocery store and buy do-it-yourself pizza. The ingredients for the dough were in a box, and maybe the tomato sauce, but apparently not the cheese because she used to make it with American cheese. Somehow that didn’t enhance pizza’s taste value for me. “I don’t like pizza from a box, I’d rather have a bagel and lox. I don’t like pizza with this cheese, so you can take my portion, please!”
A few years later, my father hooked up with a man named Bernie who was a chef from Chicago and together they opened a small pizza restaurant in Springfield. They called it Bernie and Betty’s, which I guess they figured would sound somewhat more euphonious than Dave and Molly’s, if not more Italian. Bernie’s pizza is what finally won me over. His pies were topped with giant pieces of green pepper and onion and mushroom, and some kind of really yummy seasoning. The sauce was delicious. The cheese was great. The crust was just right. I loved the stuff! So much that for many years I didn’t like anyone else’s pizza. I’d eat it, of course – Pizza Hut or Shakey’s or whatever if that’s all I could get – but always with wistful remembrance of Bernie’s creations.
I wasn’t alone in my admiration. More than once – meaning at least twice – I overheard strangers discussing the pizza options in Springfield and raving about Bernie and Betty’s. Bernie died long ago but when my dad sold the restaurant he also sold the recipe, so Bernie’s pizza has lived on after him in all its unique glory. (The restaurant is still there, with the same name, much larger now and with a full menu of pasta dishes and such.)
It’s all my dad’s and Bernie’s fault, therefore, that I became a typical American pizza addict, always happy for an excuse to order and, no longer living in Springfield, willing to call or visit just about any restaurant. Except one. Which shall remain nameless. My daughter and I ordered from that place one night when we were living in the Chicago area. I don’t know why I went along with calling them since I already knew I didn’t like their product. And when it came, I took maybe two bites and quit. Me, quit eating? That’s unheard of. Except now you’ve all heard of it, but it’s probably the only time that ever happened. But heck, the stuff tasted like cardboard covered with tomato sauce. It’s a good thing for this particular chain that my opinion was the minority one, because amazingly (to me) it’s still in business,
Now we get to the day in 1999 when I became a delivery driver for Pizza Hut. This was in Galesburg, Illinois where I was finding it very difficult to get a job that provided a livable wage, and having become used to living on tips as a waitress, was willing to try doing the same as a driver. I worked there for 16 months, until I moved to Urbana after the Fast Food Hell accident you read about last week. And that experience was probably the beginning of the end of my love affair with pizza. First because it was way too available. Every time the cooks made a mistake, such as putting the wrong topping on a pizza someone had ordered, they would place the mistake on a table in the delivery area and we were all welcome to it. And the cooks made enough mistakes – inadvertently or (maybe?) on purpose – to provide a continuous selection of pies for employee munching. In that environment I quickly stopped thinking of pizza as a special fun food.
Plus I was dazed and amazed and appalled to learn how much America depends on pizza. Many households would order pizza as their family meal three or four times a week. Ordinary people, as far as I could tell. Where did they get that kind of money? And when were they getting any real nutrition? And why didn’t they tip better?
OK, just kidding about that last one. Actually tipping was pretty good. Some of the drivers would grouse loud and long whenever they got “stiffed,” but I sided with the ones who preferred to take it all in stride. After all, I had basically lived on tips for five years as a waitress, and had learned to accept the bad with the good and be happy as long as it all evened out. Also in that job tips were pretty much everything because waitress minimum hourly wage was legally several dollars below regular minimum wage. As a driver, on the other hand, I got less in tips but earned standard minimum wage as well as gas allowance. And of course all the pizza I could eat. Can’t forget that.
Delivering anything in Galesburg is quite a challenge because whoever laid out the town and assigned street numbers to the houses must not have known how to count. In most towns, at least ones where I’ve lived, the houses are numbered pretty logically. If the first one is 1401, the next one is 1403, then comes 1405, and so on. In Galesburg, it’s more likely to go like this. 1411, 1419, 1427, 1429, 1441, and then on the next corner, 1444. I’m not kidding. Just try finding 1444, where they are expecting hot pizza in a reasonable amount of time, when you can’t use basic math to calculate which house it will be and can’t see the house numbers because they are too small or too dark or hidden behind tree branches, or all three.
Another test of skill for Galesburg delivery drivers are the trains. Galesburg started out as a railroad town and must have more train tracks per capita than any city in the U.S. In order to get your deliveries made in a timely fashion, you had to calculate how to avoid streets crossed by train tracks and instead choose streets that ran under tracked viaducts. But sometimes there were just no good option. One day I literally was unable to get to my customer. Every way I tried to go was blocked by a million-mile long train that either wasn’t moving or was moving very slowly. I was triangulated by three different tracks. Me and a rapidly cooling pizza, destined for a hungry and unhappy and soon to be unhappier diner when he or she bit into a cold pizza.
Then there are the dogs. Dogs are an occupational hazard for delivery people, at least for delivery people like yours truly who doesn’t much like dogs and basically is scared of them. There was a family who lived out in the country, one of the families who ordered about every other day. The first time I drove into their yard (yard, no driveway) my car was immediately surrounded by four or five large and loudly barking canines. No way was I getting out of that car. Since I didn’t have a cell phone at the time, I just sat there and waited for someone in the house to notice all the barking and come out to check. The mom finally did, and of course she said, it’s OK, come on out, the dogs won’t hurt you, they’re very friendly. Yeah. Sure. I wasn’t buying it. If she wanted her pizza order she’d have to come to me. And she did, but not gladly. I delivered there a couple more times but never left my car, and clearly that woman didn’t like me much.
The vindication for my attitude towards dogs came one night about 11:00 p.m. when I knocked on a door and was greeted by some truly fierce barking and growling accompanied by intense scrabbling of sharp-sounding claws against wood. I expected to hear the usual (and totally unreliable) “it’s OK, the dog won’t hurt you, he’s very friendly,” but instead a voice on the other side of the door nervously instructed me to walk across the porch and wait at a different door. “The dog really wants to hurt you,” the owner said when he came out to get his order. And it definitely sounded like if I had stayed much longer at the first door, that animal would have forced his way through it and eaten me, with the pizza for dessert.
I was still shaking and quaking about my close call with canine drivercide when I returned to the restaurant and learned that the cooks had made one of their mistakes and I had delivered a different pizza than the customer wanted. Which meant I had to go back to that house and deliver the correct order and give that dog another chance to devour me. And the worst part? These second trips to correct cooks’ mistakes never meant second tips for the driver, while at the same time they kept her/him from delivering to a potentially tipping customer. Killer canines and no tips. What a job!
After I left Galesburg (remember the Fast Food Hell accident from last week’s blog?), my slow evolution toward eventually becoming mostly vegan began. Vegans are vegetarians who don’t eat any animal products, including dairy, so now I haven’t had even a taste of pizza for over two years and have basically come back full circle to my nine-year-old opinion. If someone here sold a good, healthy vegan pizza, with a palatable vegan cheese substitute, I’d probably love it. But so far I haven’t found a vegan cheese that doesn’t taste like wallpaper paste.
Hmmm, maybe I should suggest to that chain which shall remain nameless that they make a vegan alternative. Wallpaper paste on cardboard. Who knows, I might like it. Stranger things have happened.
-30-
And where is that? Since you asked, I’ll tell you.
Some of my younger readers (do I have any of those?) might be surprised to know that even someone (ahem) as young as me can remember a time before pizza became our unofficial national food. According to the Ultimate Authority (also known as Wikopedia), pizza started to become a common American food in the mid 1950’s. Not in Springfield, Illinois, though. It must have been around 1954 that my Aunt Dora and her daughter came to visit from St. Louis, Missouri, and were absolutely scandalized to learn that not only did our town not have any place from which to order this pseudo-Italian delicacy, but that my mother had no idea what a pizza was. No, wait, I must be remembering this wrong. Not about my mother, about the pizza availability situation. We had to have at least one pizzeria in town by then, maybe a tiny shop on a dark corner in an otherwise empty part of town where we had never ventured, because somehow Aunt Dora found it and brought pizza into our home for the first time. Our reaction? Yech! We did not like it, not at all.
I felt like the main character in Green Eggs and Ham, even though that book hadn’t yet been published. “I do not like this pizza pie, I do not like it, that’s no lie. I don’t like pizza hot or cold. I don’t like pizza new or old. I do not like it with a pop. I do not like it so please stop. I do not like it, Auntie dear. You can have the rest. Here!”
Eventually my mother decided that since most of the country was becoming pizza crazed, maybe the stuff couldn’t be all bad. She wasn’t about to spend money ordering it ready made, though. Instead she would go to the grocery store and buy do-it-yourself pizza. The ingredients for the dough were in a box, and maybe the tomato sauce, but apparently not the cheese because she used to make it with American cheese. Somehow that didn’t enhance pizza’s taste value for me. “I don’t like pizza from a box, I’d rather have a bagel and lox. I don’t like pizza with this cheese, so you can take my portion, please!”
A few years later, my father hooked up with a man named Bernie who was a chef from Chicago and together they opened a small pizza restaurant in Springfield. They called it Bernie and Betty’s, which I guess they figured would sound somewhat more euphonious than Dave and Molly’s, if not more Italian. Bernie’s pizza is what finally won me over. His pies were topped with giant pieces of green pepper and onion and mushroom, and some kind of really yummy seasoning. The sauce was delicious. The cheese was great. The crust was just right. I loved the stuff! So much that for many years I didn’t like anyone else’s pizza. I’d eat it, of course – Pizza Hut or Shakey’s or whatever if that’s all I could get – but always with wistful remembrance of Bernie’s creations.
I wasn’t alone in my admiration. More than once – meaning at least twice – I overheard strangers discussing the pizza options in Springfield and raving about Bernie and Betty’s. Bernie died long ago but when my dad sold the restaurant he also sold the recipe, so Bernie’s pizza has lived on after him in all its unique glory. (The restaurant is still there, with the same name, much larger now and with a full menu of pasta dishes and such.)
It’s all my dad’s and Bernie’s fault, therefore, that I became a typical American pizza addict, always happy for an excuse to order and, no longer living in Springfield, willing to call or visit just about any restaurant. Except one. Which shall remain nameless. My daughter and I ordered from that place one night when we were living in the Chicago area. I don’t know why I went along with calling them since I already knew I didn’t like their product. And when it came, I took maybe two bites and quit. Me, quit eating? That’s unheard of. Except now you’ve all heard of it, but it’s probably the only time that ever happened. But heck, the stuff tasted like cardboard covered with tomato sauce. It’s a good thing for this particular chain that my opinion was the minority one, because amazingly (to me) it’s still in business,
Now we get to the day in 1999 when I became a delivery driver for Pizza Hut. This was in Galesburg, Illinois where I was finding it very difficult to get a job that provided a livable wage, and having become used to living on tips as a waitress, was willing to try doing the same as a driver. I worked there for 16 months, until I moved to Urbana after the Fast Food Hell accident you read about last week. And that experience was probably the beginning of the end of my love affair with pizza. First because it was way too available. Every time the cooks made a mistake, such as putting the wrong topping on a pizza someone had ordered, they would place the mistake on a table in the delivery area and we were all welcome to it. And the cooks made enough mistakes – inadvertently or (maybe?) on purpose – to provide a continuous selection of pies for employee munching. In that environment I quickly stopped thinking of pizza as a special fun food.
Plus I was dazed and amazed and appalled to learn how much America depends on pizza. Many households would order pizza as their family meal three or four times a week. Ordinary people, as far as I could tell. Where did they get that kind of money? And when were they getting any real nutrition? And why didn’t they tip better?
OK, just kidding about that last one. Actually tipping was pretty good. Some of the drivers would grouse loud and long whenever they got “stiffed,” but I sided with the ones who preferred to take it all in stride. After all, I had basically lived on tips for five years as a waitress, and had learned to accept the bad with the good and be happy as long as it all evened out. Also in that job tips were pretty much everything because waitress minimum hourly wage was legally several dollars below regular minimum wage. As a driver, on the other hand, I got less in tips but earned standard minimum wage as well as gas allowance. And of course all the pizza I could eat. Can’t forget that.
Delivering anything in Galesburg is quite a challenge because whoever laid out the town and assigned street numbers to the houses must not have known how to count. In most towns, at least ones where I’ve lived, the houses are numbered pretty logically. If the first one is 1401, the next one is 1403, then comes 1405, and so on. In Galesburg, it’s more likely to go like this. 1411, 1419, 1427, 1429, 1441, and then on the next corner, 1444. I’m not kidding. Just try finding 1444, where they are expecting hot pizza in a reasonable amount of time, when you can’t use basic math to calculate which house it will be and can’t see the house numbers because they are too small or too dark or hidden behind tree branches, or all three.
Another test of skill for Galesburg delivery drivers are the trains. Galesburg started out as a railroad town and must have more train tracks per capita than any city in the U.S. In order to get your deliveries made in a timely fashion, you had to calculate how to avoid streets crossed by train tracks and instead choose streets that ran under tracked viaducts. But sometimes there were just no good option. One day I literally was unable to get to my customer. Every way I tried to go was blocked by a million-mile long train that either wasn’t moving or was moving very slowly. I was triangulated by three different tracks. Me and a rapidly cooling pizza, destined for a hungry and unhappy and soon to be unhappier diner when he or she bit into a cold pizza.
Then there are the dogs. Dogs are an occupational hazard for delivery people, at least for delivery people like yours truly who doesn’t much like dogs and basically is scared of them. There was a family who lived out in the country, one of the families who ordered about every other day. The first time I drove into their yard (yard, no driveway) my car was immediately surrounded by four or five large and loudly barking canines. No way was I getting out of that car. Since I didn’t have a cell phone at the time, I just sat there and waited for someone in the house to notice all the barking and come out to check. The mom finally did, and of course she said, it’s OK, come on out, the dogs won’t hurt you, they’re very friendly. Yeah. Sure. I wasn’t buying it. If she wanted her pizza order she’d have to come to me. And she did, but not gladly. I delivered there a couple more times but never left my car, and clearly that woman didn’t like me much.
The vindication for my attitude towards dogs came one night about 11:00 p.m. when I knocked on a door and was greeted by some truly fierce barking and growling accompanied by intense scrabbling of sharp-sounding claws against wood. I expected to hear the usual (and totally unreliable) “it’s OK, the dog won’t hurt you, he’s very friendly,” but instead a voice on the other side of the door nervously instructed me to walk across the porch and wait at a different door. “The dog really wants to hurt you,” the owner said when he came out to get his order. And it definitely sounded like if I had stayed much longer at the first door, that animal would have forced his way through it and eaten me, with the pizza for dessert.
I was still shaking and quaking about my close call with canine drivercide when I returned to the restaurant and learned that the cooks had made one of their mistakes and I had delivered a different pizza than the customer wanted. Which meant I had to go back to that house and deliver the correct order and give that dog another chance to devour me. And the worst part? These second trips to correct cooks’ mistakes never meant second tips for the driver, while at the same time they kept her/him from delivering to a potentially tipping customer. Killer canines and no tips. What a job!
After I left Galesburg (remember the Fast Food Hell accident from last week’s blog?), my slow evolution toward eventually becoming mostly vegan began. Vegans are vegetarians who don’t eat any animal products, including dairy, so now I haven’t had even a taste of pizza for over two years and have basically come back full circle to my nine-year-old opinion. If someone here sold a good, healthy vegan pizza, with a palatable vegan cheese substitute, I’d probably love it. But so far I haven’t found a vegan cheese that doesn’t taste like wallpaper paste.
Hmmm, maybe I should suggest to that chain which shall remain nameless that they make a vegan alternative. Wallpaper paste on cardboard. Who knows, I might like it. Stranger things have happened.
-30-
Sunday, November 15, 2009
Cranksgiving and other bits of tid
Thoughts rumbling through my brain tonight …
Cranksgiving
It’s a great way to combine recreational biking with service and charity. We had our second local Cranksgiving ride yesterday, on a lovely, unseasonably warm and happily dry day. The idea is to pick one store in each of four zones which together pretty well cover the whole city (or twin cities, in our case), then buy at least one of the designated items at each store: tuna or soup in Zone 1, for example, or canned corn or sweet potatoes in Zone 4. Riders could choose to buy as little or as much as they could stuff in their backpacks and baskets and, in some cases, bike trailers. At least half the fun is hooking up with other riders and plotting the best routes and strategy. Our group numbered 7, including one couple on a tandem bike and one guy on a recumbent three-wheeler, and our plan of attack was designed to get us from place to place with the least amount of cycling in traffic and to make our last stop the store closest to the finish point. We didn’t bike a huge amount of miles, less than 20 probably, but while most people think central Illinois is flat, cyclists know that there are lots of uphill, or at least upslope, places, and pushing your bike up and against a hefty wind at the same time that you are hauling several extra pounds of canned goods can be mighty challenging. So next Cranksgiving I hope to remember to buy just a couple things at each of the first three stores and save the bulk of purchases for the store that’s only a few blocks from Cranksgiving central. It’s asking a lot, though, for me to remember something for a whole year, especially since yesterday I couldn’t even remember (with instructions in hand) which items had to be purchased in which zones! No matter. Zone accuracy notwithstanding, it all contributed to the pile of items waiting to be transported to the food bank.
Been there, done that
Maybe one reason I like participating in Cranksgiving is that there have been a couple times in past years – long past, thankfully – when I needed food bank assistance. In both cases the Salvation Army was my personal salvation. Hooray for the Army!
Cleanliness is next to miraculous!
My financial situation is fortunately much better these days, which is why I’ve recently started doing something I’ve wanted to do for many years but never thought would be possible – paying someone else to clean my house. Not the whole house, and not every day, actually just two hours a week. But what she gets done and done well in two hours beats anything I could manage in a whole day, even if I were so inclined. The first two or three times she came, she took care of big projects that had been neglected to the point of disgust, like cleaning and organizing the utility area, degreasing the walls around the stove and attacking the growing cultures inside the refrigerator. Now we’re into basic maintenance, and let me tell you, it is an absolute joy to leave a sticky kitchen floor in the morning and come home to a sparkling clean one at the end of the work day. My miracle worker is a graduate student and won’t be around for a month or so during winter break. I’m considering moving to a motel for the duration!
Good reads about basic assumptions
The underlying question in the whole health care reform debate, according to author T. R. Reid, is whether or not we believe that every American deserves equal access to medical care when needed. That’s the question he raises in The Healing of America, a comprehensive and (I think) objective comparison of other countries’ health care systems with ours. He doesn’t endorse any one system and points out that there are lots of ways to achieve the same goal if we ever manage to agree on that goal.
On a different front, another assumption that has been basic to the development of our culture has been, to put it bluntly, Blacks don’t belong here. When historian James Loewen started the research for Sundown Towns he expected to find only a few hundred places that had told African-Americans and sometimes others (Jews, Native Americans, Chinese immigrants) to get out of town before sundown, or else. Instead he found thousands of cities and towns and suburbs all over the country that had such laws, and in many cases still have them, either outright legislated or accepted unofficially by their citizens – places where even President Obama would not be welcome to spend the night if he popped in on his own without a Secret Service entourage. Check it out, it’s quite an eye-opener.
Fear of success
Scary moment: hitting the submit button to send my master’s program application on its way to the admissions reviewers. Surprising moment: realizing the scary part was not fear of rejection but omigoshwhatiftheyacceptmeandIactuallyhavetodoit!
Half-formed thoughts tripping lightly through my brain which might one day grow up to become complete blogs …
Why does almost every student and faculty member and applicant who stops by my desk or calls on the phone start by saying they have “a quick question”? What is a quick question? What is a not-quick question? Is one better than the other? Does a quick question mean a question that only requires a quick answer? “Yep?” “Nope?” “Maybe?” “Ask me again next week?” I have no idea why “quick question” is such a popular phrase. Maybe you do. In that case, do you mind if I ask you a quick question …
I also wonder about another interesting bit of human behavior, a kind of herd instinct involved in going through doors. If there is a choice of three side-by-side doors, as in the main library on the campus where I work, and 10 people are all heading toward them, wouldn’t you think they would fan out and use all three doors? I mean really, wouldn’t that make sense? Instead what I see repeatedly is nine people following one person through one door while completely ignoring the other two. Why? OK, so this isn’t exactly an earth-shaking problem, but I’d still like to know the answer. If you are aware of someone who might know, please tell me so I can ask them a quick question.
And what do people mean when they say “have a good” day or night? What constitutes “good” in this instance? And if you’re running into the grocery store at 10:00 p.m. to pick up one onion, isn’t it a little late for the cashier to wish you a good evening? Then there are the people who say “Have a good one.” A good -- what? OK, I know everyone means well or at least that there is nothing sinister about this or the other above mentioned behavior quirks. But you know, I just can’t help wondering.
In case you are wondering why you are still reading this disjointed blog, let me just end it here and say good night. Have a good week!
-30-
Cranksgiving
It’s a great way to combine recreational biking with service and charity. We had our second local Cranksgiving ride yesterday, on a lovely, unseasonably warm and happily dry day. The idea is to pick one store in each of four zones which together pretty well cover the whole city (or twin cities, in our case), then buy at least one of the designated items at each store: tuna or soup in Zone 1, for example, or canned corn or sweet potatoes in Zone 4. Riders could choose to buy as little or as much as they could stuff in their backpacks and baskets and, in some cases, bike trailers. At least half the fun is hooking up with other riders and plotting the best routes and strategy. Our group numbered 7, including one couple on a tandem bike and one guy on a recumbent three-wheeler, and our plan of attack was designed to get us from place to place with the least amount of cycling in traffic and to make our last stop the store closest to the finish point. We didn’t bike a huge amount of miles, less than 20 probably, but while most people think central Illinois is flat, cyclists know that there are lots of uphill, or at least upslope, places, and pushing your bike up and against a hefty wind at the same time that you are hauling several extra pounds of canned goods can be mighty challenging. So next Cranksgiving I hope to remember to buy just a couple things at each of the first three stores and save the bulk of purchases for the store that’s only a few blocks from Cranksgiving central. It’s asking a lot, though, for me to remember something for a whole year, especially since yesterday I couldn’t even remember (with instructions in hand) which items had to be purchased in which zones! No matter. Zone accuracy notwithstanding, it all contributed to the pile of items waiting to be transported to the food bank.
Been there, done that
Maybe one reason I like participating in Cranksgiving is that there have been a couple times in past years – long past, thankfully – when I needed food bank assistance. In both cases the Salvation Army was my personal salvation. Hooray for the Army!
Cleanliness is next to miraculous!
My financial situation is fortunately much better these days, which is why I’ve recently started doing something I’ve wanted to do for many years but never thought would be possible – paying someone else to clean my house. Not the whole house, and not every day, actually just two hours a week. But what she gets done and done well in two hours beats anything I could manage in a whole day, even if I were so inclined. The first two or three times she came, she took care of big projects that had been neglected to the point of disgust, like cleaning and organizing the utility area, degreasing the walls around the stove and attacking the growing cultures inside the refrigerator. Now we’re into basic maintenance, and let me tell you, it is an absolute joy to leave a sticky kitchen floor in the morning and come home to a sparkling clean one at the end of the work day. My miracle worker is a graduate student and won’t be around for a month or so during winter break. I’m considering moving to a motel for the duration!
Good reads about basic assumptions
The underlying question in the whole health care reform debate, according to author T. R. Reid, is whether or not we believe that every American deserves equal access to medical care when needed. That’s the question he raises in The Healing of America, a comprehensive and (I think) objective comparison of other countries’ health care systems with ours. He doesn’t endorse any one system and points out that there are lots of ways to achieve the same goal if we ever manage to agree on that goal.
On a different front, another assumption that has been basic to the development of our culture has been, to put it bluntly, Blacks don’t belong here. When historian James Loewen started the research for Sundown Towns he expected to find only a few hundred places that had told African-Americans and sometimes others (Jews, Native Americans, Chinese immigrants) to get out of town before sundown, or else. Instead he found thousands of cities and towns and suburbs all over the country that had such laws, and in many cases still have them, either outright legislated or accepted unofficially by their citizens – places where even President Obama would not be welcome to spend the night if he popped in on his own without a Secret Service entourage. Check it out, it’s quite an eye-opener.
Fear of success
Scary moment: hitting the submit button to send my master’s program application on its way to the admissions reviewers. Surprising moment: realizing the scary part was not fear of rejection but omigoshwhatiftheyacceptmeandIactuallyhavetodoit!
Half-formed thoughts tripping lightly through my brain which might one day grow up to become complete blogs …
Why does almost every student and faculty member and applicant who stops by my desk or calls on the phone start by saying they have “a quick question”? What is a quick question? What is a not-quick question? Is one better than the other? Does a quick question mean a question that only requires a quick answer? “Yep?” “Nope?” “Maybe?” “Ask me again next week?” I have no idea why “quick question” is such a popular phrase. Maybe you do. In that case, do you mind if I ask you a quick question …
I also wonder about another interesting bit of human behavior, a kind of herd instinct involved in going through doors. If there is a choice of three side-by-side doors, as in the main library on the campus where I work, and 10 people are all heading toward them, wouldn’t you think they would fan out and use all three doors? I mean really, wouldn’t that make sense? Instead what I see repeatedly is nine people following one person through one door while completely ignoring the other two. Why? OK, so this isn’t exactly an earth-shaking problem, but I’d still like to know the answer. If you are aware of someone who might know, please tell me so I can ask them a quick question.
And what do people mean when they say “have a good” day or night? What constitutes “good” in this instance? And if you’re running into the grocery store at 10:00 p.m. to pick up one onion, isn’t it a little late for the cashier to wish you a good evening? Then there are the people who say “Have a good one.” A good -- what? OK, I know everyone means well or at least that there is nothing sinister about this or the other above mentioned behavior quirks. But you know, I just can’t help wondering.
In case you are wondering why you are still reading this disjointed blog, let me just end it here and say good night. Have a good week!
-30-
Sunday, November 8, 2009
Wham!
If my friend’s car accident last week served as an answer to a prayer – mine, not hers – it wouldn’t be the first time that particular delivery system was used to send me a message from wherever such messages come. The other time this happened was nine years ago, when I was trying to decide whether to move to Urbana, and the message was “so go already!”
Car accidents have been much too common events in my life. Eight times too common, if I’m remembering all of them. No one who ever rode with me would dispute that I’m a lousy driver. I wouldn’t even dispute it. Yet only two of those eight incidents were my fault. Honest. I’ll prove it.
There was the time that my then 4-year-old daughter and I were on our way from Chicago to Springfield on I-55 (or was that section of highway still called Route 66 back then?) and about halfway there a deer – one that was larger than the Volkswagon Beetle I was driving – leaped out from the side of the road right in front of us. Wham! “Mommy, mommy, look at the big brown dog!” Shock. Surprise that we are still moving. Confusion: what do I do now? Was it really a dog?
OK, I knew it wasn’t a dog. And I soon figured out that we were very lucky, because when it hit my car (I refuse to say that the car hit it) the only point of connection was my driver’s side headlight with the deer’s hip. It was able to finish crossing the road without colliding with any other car and my teeny vehicle, along with the two of us in it, was not crushed into oblivion. Of course, the deer didn’t have insurance, but you can’t win ‘em all.
Later that same year, after we had traded in the Volkswagon for a Ford something-or-other, same daughter and I were crossing an Evanston intersection on a green light and suddenly we weren’t. Crossing, that is. A woman coming the other way, distracted because she was late for the closing on her first house, failed to see her red light in time to stop safely on wet pavement and plowed into us instead. Wham! Seatbelts and child carriers were not required at that time, so my daughter, who was sitting unattached in the front seat, bounced up and down several times, hitting her head against the ceiling of the car each time she went up. Fortunately the hospital found nothing wrong. For those of you who know her, though, now you see where she gets all her bounciness. (Yes, I really said that!)
A couple years later I was sitting – sitting, mind you, not driving – in the correct lane with my left turn signal blinking while waiting to pull into a parking lot when suddenly, wham! Another distracted driver – this time a man driving home from visiting his sister in the hospital -- unexpectedly encountered my car. Totaled it. No injuries.
Fast forward a few more years, but not so far as the everyone-has-a-cell-phone days, and I’m driving home on a very busy street when I get a flat tire. No parking lots or driveways nearby so I had to pull over to the curb and leave the car there with the flashers on while I went looking for a phone. Which put my non-mobile car in a driving lane and ... You guessed it. Along came yet another distracted driver, this time a woman rushing to get home from work who didn’t notice my flashers. Wham!
Now we get back to the prayer answering wham. August 31, 2000. I was living in Galesburg, Illinois at the time and had been thinking about moving away because the economic situation in Galesburg was bad and getting worse. My income came mainly from delivering pizza for Pizza Hut and helping personal care clients, with no health insurance or sick day pay. Grandson #1 was born on July 22, and my daughter was encouraging me to join them in Urbana. It would make a lot of sense to do that, financially and family-wise, since I definitely wanted to be an everyday grandma. However I had moved to Galesburg to help establish a Bahá'í community. After several years and a lot of hard tests, I was reluctant to leave because some good things were happening – monthly race unity potlucks, for example – so decided to stay there and re-think the relocation idea in a few months.
On August 31 I was driving back to Pizza Hut after a delivery, and getting ready to ease over into the left turn lane, while at that same moment a Papa John driver was coming out of a KFC parking lot and trying to get across two lanes of traffic in order to turn left in the opposite direction. The woman in the car ahead of me wanted to be nice so she slowed down and waved at the Papa John guy to go ahead and pull out in front of her. At that point the left turn left hadn’t opened up yet so there was no one on her left. But then, suddenly, it did and I was. Wham! Fast Food Hell!
August 31 was the day my lease was supposed to end, and I wouldn’t even have been in Galesburg if I had decided to go ahead with the move. Instead I was still there, only now with a totaled vehicle and a job for which a car was an absolute necessity. But did I pay attention? Nope. I took my insurance settlement and bought another car, an older one that I could purchase outright without payments. This was about the only smart move I made.
Because eight days later, my “new” car was parked in front of my apartment building at about 2:00 a.m. and I was in bed, having come home from a delivery shift not long before, when a neighbor came pounding on my door to tell me my car had been hit. I could barely comprehend the message. Just sort of staggered around in a daze while putting on clothing of some sort and crawling down two flights of stairs to find the way too familiar scene of police lights flashing and another totaled you-know-what. This time the other driver was distracted by an overload of alcohol consumption. He was a young man driving his dad’s now defunct car, one considerably newer than mine, and when I came out of the building he was sitting on the curb hunched over with his head in his hands, the picture of absolute hopelessness.
Please note, by the way, that this was the third time I had been in a car accident without actually being inside a car. Gotta be a record!
Same story, next chapter. I had no vehicle, but still had a job that that required one. If I stayed in Galesburg, that is. But did I pay attention? Nope, I went car shopping again, only this time with little success. I had to shop locally and fast since every day without a car was a day without income. Galesburg is a small town, and all I could quickly find was a Crown Victoria. In other words, a BIG car. It ran, though, and cost a bit less than my new insurance payment, plus the owner promised that it had good gas mileage.
Good gas mileage, right. That car literally cruised down the street sucking up gas stations whole. I would fill the tank and then watch the needle move from F to E as I was driving. And this was the same week that gas prices shot up all over the country, including in Galesburg. But did I pay attention?
Yes, I did. It seemed clear that I was being not so gently pushed out of Galesburg, that those two car accidents plus the Crown Victoria plus the gas price spike amounted to a clear warning to get-out-of-Dodge.
Or maybe I was just afraid to stay. Who knows what would happen next?
-30-
Car accidents have been much too common events in my life. Eight times too common, if I’m remembering all of them. No one who ever rode with me would dispute that I’m a lousy driver. I wouldn’t even dispute it. Yet only two of those eight incidents were my fault. Honest. I’ll prove it.
There was the time that my then 4-year-old daughter and I were on our way from Chicago to Springfield on I-55 (or was that section of highway still called Route 66 back then?) and about halfway there a deer – one that was larger than the Volkswagon Beetle I was driving – leaped out from the side of the road right in front of us. Wham! “Mommy, mommy, look at the big brown dog!” Shock. Surprise that we are still moving. Confusion: what do I do now? Was it really a dog?
OK, I knew it wasn’t a dog. And I soon figured out that we were very lucky, because when it hit my car (I refuse to say that the car hit it) the only point of connection was my driver’s side headlight with the deer’s hip. It was able to finish crossing the road without colliding with any other car and my teeny vehicle, along with the two of us in it, was not crushed into oblivion. Of course, the deer didn’t have insurance, but you can’t win ‘em all.
Later that same year, after we had traded in the Volkswagon for a Ford something-or-other, same daughter and I were crossing an Evanston intersection on a green light and suddenly we weren’t. Crossing, that is. A woman coming the other way, distracted because she was late for the closing on her first house, failed to see her red light in time to stop safely on wet pavement and plowed into us instead. Wham! Seatbelts and child carriers were not required at that time, so my daughter, who was sitting unattached in the front seat, bounced up and down several times, hitting her head against the ceiling of the car each time she went up. Fortunately the hospital found nothing wrong. For those of you who know her, though, now you see where she gets all her bounciness. (Yes, I really said that!)
A couple years later I was sitting – sitting, mind you, not driving – in the correct lane with my left turn signal blinking while waiting to pull into a parking lot when suddenly, wham! Another distracted driver – this time a man driving home from visiting his sister in the hospital -- unexpectedly encountered my car. Totaled it. No injuries.
Fast forward a few more years, but not so far as the everyone-has-a-cell-phone days, and I’m driving home on a very busy street when I get a flat tire. No parking lots or driveways nearby so I had to pull over to the curb and leave the car there with the flashers on while I went looking for a phone. Which put my non-mobile car in a driving lane and ... You guessed it. Along came yet another distracted driver, this time a woman rushing to get home from work who didn’t notice my flashers. Wham!
Now we get back to the prayer answering wham. August 31, 2000. I was living in Galesburg, Illinois at the time and had been thinking about moving away because the economic situation in Galesburg was bad and getting worse. My income came mainly from delivering pizza for Pizza Hut and helping personal care clients, with no health insurance or sick day pay. Grandson #1 was born on July 22, and my daughter was encouraging me to join them in Urbana. It would make a lot of sense to do that, financially and family-wise, since I definitely wanted to be an everyday grandma. However I had moved to Galesburg to help establish a Bahá'í community. After several years and a lot of hard tests, I was reluctant to leave because some good things were happening – monthly race unity potlucks, for example – so decided to stay there and re-think the relocation idea in a few months.
On August 31 I was driving back to Pizza Hut after a delivery, and getting ready to ease over into the left turn lane, while at that same moment a Papa John driver was coming out of a KFC parking lot and trying to get across two lanes of traffic in order to turn left in the opposite direction. The woman in the car ahead of me wanted to be nice so she slowed down and waved at the Papa John guy to go ahead and pull out in front of her. At that point the left turn left hadn’t opened up yet so there was no one on her left. But then, suddenly, it did and I was. Wham! Fast Food Hell!
August 31 was the day my lease was supposed to end, and I wouldn’t even have been in Galesburg if I had decided to go ahead with the move. Instead I was still there, only now with a totaled vehicle and a job for which a car was an absolute necessity. But did I pay attention? Nope. I took my insurance settlement and bought another car, an older one that I could purchase outright without payments. This was about the only smart move I made.
Because eight days later, my “new” car was parked in front of my apartment building at about 2:00 a.m. and I was in bed, having come home from a delivery shift not long before, when a neighbor came pounding on my door to tell me my car had been hit. I could barely comprehend the message. Just sort of staggered around in a daze while putting on clothing of some sort and crawling down two flights of stairs to find the way too familiar scene of police lights flashing and another totaled you-know-what. This time the other driver was distracted by an overload of alcohol consumption. He was a young man driving his dad’s now defunct car, one considerably newer than mine, and when I came out of the building he was sitting on the curb hunched over with his head in his hands, the picture of absolute hopelessness.
Please note, by the way, that this was the third time I had been in a car accident without actually being inside a car. Gotta be a record!
Same story, next chapter. I had no vehicle, but still had a job that that required one. If I stayed in Galesburg, that is. But did I pay attention? Nope, I went car shopping again, only this time with little success. I had to shop locally and fast since every day without a car was a day without income. Galesburg is a small town, and all I could quickly find was a Crown Victoria. In other words, a BIG car. It ran, though, and cost a bit less than my new insurance payment, plus the owner promised that it had good gas mileage.
Good gas mileage, right. That car literally cruised down the street sucking up gas stations whole. I would fill the tank and then watch the needle move from F to E as I was driving. And this was the same week that gas prices shot up all over the country, including in Galesburg. But did I pay attention?
Yes, I did. It seemed clear that I was being not so gently pushed out of Galesburg, that those two car accidents plus the Crown Victoria plus the gas price spike amounted to a clear warning to get-out-of-Dodge.
Or maybe I was just afraid to stay. Who knows what would happen next?
-30-
Sunday, November 1, 2009
Job Talk
Prayers get answered in strange and unpredictable ways.
And trying to put those answers into comprehensible words is like trying to hold a handful of water. But even the most specific and impossible to describe personal moments are also universal experiences, so maybe it’s worth a try.
Recently I had been feeling much too attached to this contingent world and had prayed, very specifically, for help with that situation. "Contingent world" is a term sometimes used in the Bahá'í Writings to designate our physical existence on a material plane bound by the limitations of time and space. A world where it’s easy to get so enmeshed in daily activities and objectives that you forget – or at least, I forget – that the ultimate purpose and goal of life is to acquire spiritual qualities, the only possessions we can take with us when we leave this planet. Bahá'u'lláh says that “death is a messenger of joy,” and so I prayed to have less fear of leaving the life I know now and more assurance about that joy, to know it with certainty and to more fully experience that certainty as a solid reality, as solid as the material things and activities I will leave behind.
Of course, not everyone believes that we take anything with us, because to agree with that statement you have to first believe that we have some kind of existence beyond the death and disintegration of our physical bodies. But I think that most people, whatever their religious inclinations, would agree that human beings are capable of understanding life on levels beyond the physical and therefore can choose to live on those higher levels, both for personal and societal benefit.
We can choose to love rather than hate. To help rather than hurt. To decide what is the most important thing to do rather than just react.
Or we can fail to make a choice and thus make a different choice, one that is based on personal short-term benefit instead of a larger picture.
This is a story about a choice I made one day last week and how my prayer was answered in a way I would never have expected.
My bike had a flat tire so I was hurrying out my front door to walk to the bus stop when I heard the ugly sound of metal scrunching hard against metal, a sound I know too well (but that’s another story), the sound of two cars crashing into each other. I looked across the street and saw a white car angled into the street with its rear end crunched against another car’s front end. The white car looked like my friend’s vehicle, in a general sort of way, which is pretty much the only way I see cars. The white car was stopped just beyond my friend’s driveway. This was the time I’d usually see her leaving for work, while I was getting my bike out of the shed.
Hence, it was a pretty good bet that it was her car, and that she (let’s call her Jenny) was in it when the accident happened, and was still in it.
Do you remember the old angel-and-devil-on-the-shoulders routine, the image sometimes used in movies or cartoons to depict a character’s internal argument about what he or she should do in a given situation? That pretty well describes how I felt at that moment. My angel was saying, get over there, make sure Jenny is OK, see what you can do to help. The devil, practical gal that she is, was saying, naaah, that accident just looks like a fender bender, nothing serious, and if it is serious, what could you do? You’ll just get in the way, you don’t know anything about first aid and you’re hopeless in emergencies anyway. Besides, if you don’t keep moving you’re going to miss the bus and be late for work, so come on, let’s go. Now. Go.
And I did. Go.
As I hurried down the block I looked back and saw that Jenny was out of her car and walking up to the other car. See, said my little devil. See, she’s not hurt. she’s fine, toldyaso!
But a minute later, from the corner where the bus would stop, I heard sirens and saw an ambulance and police car rushing to the accident. See, said my little angel, someone’s hurt. Even if Jenny isn’t the one, she’s bound to be really upset. She needs a friend right now. You’ll just be in the way, hissed the devil. Get over there, shouted the angel. Now. Go.
And I did. Go. Into the bus.
That has to be about the worst bus ride I’ve ever taken, because I felt so horrible about what I had just done, the choice I had made, the kind of person I had shown myself to be. The astonishing level of attachment I had displayed to MY needs, MY schedule, MY priorities, and my evident lack of concern for another human being’s obviously more urgent needs, as well as a lack of understanding of my purpose on this planet.
OK, I know that on a scale of 1 to 10 this lapse in moral judgment is pretty puny compared to other things people have done, even other things I have done. It felt huge, though, and I think it was huge, because as our capacity and understanding grow, so does our responsibility. An action I might once have barely noticed or even seen as a choice now became one of my most painful life experiences.
I tried to make amends by calling Jenny a little while later, figuring by then she would have finished dealing with the accident and be at work. Instead she was still home, and crying. She said the ambulance came because one of the passengers in the other car was pregnant and had been rushed off to the hospital as a precaution. Jenny clearly needed someone with her at that moment, and I was the someone who could have been there, had I chosen to do so.
“Oh Lord, make me a hollow reed from which the pith of self has been blown, that I may become a clear channel through which Thy love may flow to all others.” That’s the lyric in a beautiful song based on Baha’i scripture, one of my favorites. Sitting on the bus, and later at my desk after the phone call, I felt like a reed, all right – one clogged and choked with debris.
I thought about the idea that service is our life purpose, and about how I could have served Jenny’s needs. Maybe by listening while she talked about the accident. Maybe by praying with her. Or making her a cup of tea. Or just sitting with her. Whatever was called for, at that moment when I heard the crash and saw Jenny’s car my real job was to be willing to be that clear channel. Like Scrooge, my definition of work has been altered by a spirit's visit.
I’ve talked to Jenny a couple times since then, and she’s OK. My not being there for her that morning certainly didn’t ruin her life. I’ve apologized to her for not stopping, an apology that was mainly for my benefit because it’s unlikely she expected anything from me or was thinking about me in any way at all. I’ve accepted the experience gratefully as the answer (or at least one answer) to my prayer and stopped agonizing over my poor choice, following the Twelve Step promise to “not regret the past nor wish to shut the door on it.”
And I've decided it’s probably no coincidence that I hadn’t taken time that morning to pray and meditate, beyond a couple of quick prayers when I first woke up. Hadn’t stopped in my rushing around to get dressed and make lunch to spend even two minutes to put myself into a still space and reconnect with my God. So the incident also made it clear that such stillness and connection is indispensable.
A couple of days later I read something else that helped put the experience into perspective. “What result is forthcoming from material rest, tranquility, luxury and attachment to this corporeal world? It is evident that the man who pursues these things will in the end become afflicted with regret and loss.”
-30-
And trying to put those answers into comprehensible words is like trying to hold a handful of water. But even the most specific and impossible to describe personal moments are also universal experiences, so maybe it’s worth a try.
Recently I had been feeling much too attached to this contingent world and had prayed, very specifically, for help with that situation. "Contingent world" is a term sometimes used in the Bahá'í Writings to designate our physical existence on a material plane bound by the limitations of time and space. A world where it’s easy to get so enmeshed in daily activities and objectives that you forget – or at least, I forget – that the ultimate purpose and goal of life is to acquire spiritual qualities, the only possessions we can take with us when we leave this planet. Bahá'u'lláh says that “death is a messenger of joy,” and so I prayed to have less fear of leaving the life I know now and more assurance about that joy, to know it with certainty and to more fully experience that certainty as a solid reality, as solid as the material things and activities I will leave behind.
Of course, not everyone believes that we take anything with us, because to agree with that statement you have to first believe that we have some kind of existence beyond the death and disintegration of our physical bodies. But I think that most people, whatever their religious inclinations, would agree that human beings are capable of understanding life on levels beyond the physical and therefore can choose to live on those higher levels, both for personal and societal benefit.
We can choose to love rather than hate. To help rather than hurt. To decide what is the most important thing to do rather than just react.
Or we can fail to make a choice and thus make a different choice, one that is based on personal short-term benefit instead of a larger picture.
This is a story about a choice I made one day last week and how my prayer was answered in a way I would never have expected.
My bike had a flat tire so I was hurrying out my front door to walk to the bus stop when I heard the ugly sound of metal scrunching hard against metal, a sound I know too well (but that’s another story), the sound of two cars crashing into each other. I looked across the street and saw a white car angled into the street with its rear end crunched against another car’s front end. The white car looked like my friend’s vehicle, in a general sort of way, which is pretty much the only way I see cars. The white car was stopped just beyond my friend’s driveway. This was the time I’d usually see her leaving for work, while I was getting my bike out of the shed.
Hence, it was a pretty good bet that it was her car, and that she (let’s call her Jenny) was in it when the accident happened, and was still in it.
Do you remember the old angel-and-devil-on-the-shoulders routine, the image sometimes used in movies or cartoons to depict a character’s internal argument about what he or she should do in a given situation? That pretty well describes how I felt at that moment. My angel was saying, get over there, make sure Jenny is OK, see what you can do to help. The devil, practical gal that she is, was saying, naaah, that accident just looks like a fender bender, nothing serious, and if it is serious, what could you do? You’ll just get in the way, you don’t know anything about first aid and you’re hopeless in emergencies anyway. Besides, if you don’t keep moving you’re going to miss the bus and be late for work, so come on, let’s go. Now. Go.
And I did. Go.
As I hurried down the block I looked back and saw that Jenny was out of her car and walking up to the other car. See, said my little devil. See, she’s not hurt. she’s fine, toldyaso!
But a minute later, from the corner where the bus would stop, I heard sirens and saw an ambulance and police car rushing to the accident. See, said my little angel, someone’s hurt. Even if Jenny isn’t the one, she’s bound to be really upset. She needs a friend right now. You’ll just be in the way, hissed the devil. Get over there, shouted the angel. Now. Go.
And I did. Go. Into the bus.
That has to be about the worst bus ride I’ve ever taken, because I felt so horrible about what I had just done, the choice I had made, the kind of person I had shown myself to be. The astonishing level of attachment I had displayed to MY needs, MY schedule, MY priorities, and my evident lack of concern for another human being’s obviously more urgent needs, as well as a lack of understanding of my purpose on this planet.
OK, I know that on a scale of 1 to 10 this lapse in moral judgment is pretty puny compared to other things people have done, even other things I have done. It felt huge, though, and I think it was huge, because as our capacity and understanding grow, so does our responsibility. An action I might once have barely noticed or even seen as a choice now became one of my most painful life experiences.
I tried to make amends by calling Jenny a little while later, figuring by then she would have finished dealing with the accident and be at work. Instead she was still home, and crying. She said the ambulance came because one of the passengers in the other car was pregnant and had been rushed off to the hospital as a precaution. Jenny clearly needed someone with her at that moment, and I was the someone who could have been there, had I chosen to do so.
“Oh Lord, make me a hollow reed from which the pith of self has been blown, that I may become a clear channel through which Thy love may flow to all others.” That’s the lyric in a beautiful song based on Baha’i scripture, one of my favorites. Sitting on the bus, and later at my desk after the phone call, I felt like a reed, all right – one clogged and choked with debris.
I thought about the idea that service is our life purpose, and about how I could have served Jenny’s needs. Maybe by listening while she talked about the accident. Maybe by praying with her. Or making her a cup of tea. Or just sitting with her. Whatever was called for, at that moment when I heard the crash and saw Jenny’s car my real job was to be willing to be that clear channel. Like Scrooge, my definition of work has been altered by a spirit's visit.
I’ve talked to Jenny a couple times since then, and she’s OK. My not being there for her that morning certainly didn’t ruin her life. I’ve apologized to her for not stopping, an apology that was mainly for my benefit because it’s unlikely she expected anything from me or was thinking about me in any way at all. I’ve accepted the experience gratefully as the answer (or at least one answer) to my prayer and stopped agonizing over my poor choice, following the Twelve Step promise to “not regret the past nor wish to shut the door on it.”
And I've decided it’s probably no coincidence that I hadn’t taken time that morning to pray and meditate, beyond a couple of quick prayers when I first woke up. Hadn’t stopped in my rushing around to get dressed and make lunch to spend even two minutes to put myself into a still space and reconnect with my God. So the incident also made it clear that such stillness and connection is indispensable.
A couple of days later I read something else that helped put the experience into perspective. “What result is forthcoming from material rest, tranquility, luxury and attachment to this corporeal world? It is evident that the man who pursues these things will in the end become afflicted with regret and loss.”
-30-
Sunday, October 25, 2009
Logic on Ice
Applying for full-time study in a master’s program in the sixth decade of my life is probably no more outlandish than thinking I could possibly learn to figure skate in the third decade or re-learn it now. Because, as you might remember from the first blog in this skating series, I am about as non-athletic as anyone can be. And whereas running and biking, at least in their elementary forms, are sports that most people either can do naturally or can learn easily, figure skating – even in its beginning stages -- is a much bigger challenge. It takes balance, coordination, flexibility, knowing right from left.
So when the local rink re-opened after its summer hiatus I was happy to find that the previous nine months of doggedly working on basic skills like skating forward while not tripping over my toe picks, gliding on one foot for more than an inch at a time, and crossing one foot over the other without clanging the two blades together and landing on my you-know-what… that all that work had led me to finally regain a basic sense of comfort on the ice. And now I was ready to start working on slightly higher level skills, i.e., beginning maneuvers done on one foot -- a couple of basic turns --or even no feet -- a bunny hop, wherein the goal is to leave the ice completely for at least a second
Which means I’ve reached a stage of learning in one year that took me at least two or three years the first time around. So what, you might ask, kept me going back then when my progress was almost invisible? You didn’t ask? No matter, I’ll tell you anyway.
I’m a ham.
That’s it, pure and simple.
Whether it’s childhood ballet recitals or acting in plays or presenting one-woman shows or emceeing open mics, I’m a performer at heart. And the rink in Evanston, Illinois provided plenty of performance opportunities. We had a wonderful skating director who loved putting shows together and hosting competitions and sending skaters to competitions at other rinks. Between practicing show routines and practicing solos and practicing with the precision teams for competitions and practicing for tests and just general practicing, my daughter and I spent an amazing number of hours at the rink every week. Really, we sort of lived there, along with a lot of other obsessed skaters, young and old.
Maybe it was a combination of being a ham and having become so absorbed in the world of the rink that induced me to do some things that might not be considered very logical. I mean, really, was it logical, only about a year after we started to skate, for an overweight, uncoordinated, scared-to-death-of-falling adult to agree to play the part of a housekeeper in our annual ice skating version of The Nutcracker? To wear a short-skirted French maid outfit and chase a mouse (my daughter, decked out in white fur and ears and a tail) all over the ice while threatening her with a feather duster?
Was it logical, a couple years later, to agree to emerge from behind a backdrop wearing a sort of sarong and balancing a pot of fire – real fire, I kid you not – on my head in a faux tropical number called “Princess Papuli” during our Spring show? Or, in the same show, to agree to let my daughter, who was also taking gymnastics classes, to be featured in a solo that included cartwheels and round-offs? These days it’s routine to see competitive skaters do back flips on ice, but then it wasn’t, plus we’re not talking here about a world class athlete who can triple jump in her sleep. We’re talking about a child, my only one, with no spares in the hall closet.
Was it logical to become a charter member in one of the first adult precision teams and practice kicklines with my teammates for hours so we could enter competitions that often had no other adult teams? I still have a video tape of the competition that my in-laws attended. That was the only one time that I fell during our routine. There I am on tape, arm in arm with my teammates, gliding to a T-stop in formation, and suddenly there I’m not! My in-laws REALLY enjoyed that performance.
And speaking of falling, how about the evening I was practicing bunny hops and, oops, found myself lying on the ice, staring at the ceiling but seeing – literally – stars. After sitting in the bleachers for a while to make sure I didn’t have a concussion, was it logical to stand up and get back on the ice?
You bet it was!
Not convinced? OK, I can understand that. So since logic always depends on the assumptions that are the basis for deduction, let’s look at the assumptions I was, and am again making about skating.
Assumption #1: It's important to keep learning new things throughout your life. I first heard that idea when I was maybe 20, from an elderly (i.e., about the age I am now) guy who had recently begun to play the violin. Keep learning new things throughout your life: the idea seemed pretty sensible at the time, and obviously made an impression on me since I still remember it and him.
Assumption #2: We should do what we love regardless of whether we have talent in that area. I heard someone on the radio claim that Bill Clinton once said he had never possessed the courage to venture into areas that didn’t come easily to him, and therefore he greatly admired his daughter for studying ballet even though she really didn’t have any natural aptitude for it. I don’t know if Bill Clinton actually made such a statement, but it was an encouraging thought for this doggedly perseverant no-talent ice skater.
OK, OK, I guess I’m not really sure if figure skating is logical. I am pretty sure, though, that it borders on obsession. And I’m totally sure that I’m really happy to be doing it again, with new solos on the horizon, and new bunny hops to conquer.
And this time, it's no accident!
So when the local rink re-opened after its summer hiatus I was happy to find that the previous nine months of doggedly working on basic skills like skating forward while not tripping over my toe picks, gliding on one foot for more than an inch at a time, and crossing one foot over the other without clanging the two blades together and landing on my you-know-what… that all that work had led me to finally regain a basic sense of comfort on the ice. And now I was ready to start working on slightly higher level skills, i.e., beginning maneuvers done on one foot -- a couple of basic turns --or even no feet -- a bunny hop, wherein the goal is to leave the ice completely for at least a second
Which means I’ve reached a stage of learning in one year that took me at least two or three years the first time around. So what, you might ask, kept me going back then when my progress was almost invisible? You didn’t ask? No matter, I’ll tell you anyway.
I’m a ham.
That’s it, pure and simple.
Whether it’s childhood ballet recitals or acting in plays or presenting one-woman shows or emceeing open mics, I’m a performer at heart. And the rink in Evanston, Illinois provided plenty of performance opportunities. We had a wonderful skating director who loved putting shows together and hosting competitions and sending skaters to competitions at other rinks. Between practicing show routines and practicing solos and practicing with the precision teams for competitions and practicing for tests and just general practicing, my daughter and I spent an amazing number of hours at the rink every week. Really, we sort of lived there, along with a lot of other obsessed skaters, young and old.
Maybe it was a combination of being a ham and having become so absorbed in the world of the rink that induced me to do some things that might not be considered very logical. I mean, really, was it logical, only about a year after we started to skate, for an overweight, uncoordinated, scared-to-death-of-falling adult to agree to play the part of a housekeeper in our annual ice skating version of The Nutcracker? To wear a short-skirted French maid outfit and chase a mouse (my daughter, decked out in white fur and ears and a tail) all over the ice while threatening her with a feather duster?
Was it logical, a couple years later, to agree to emerge from behind a backdrop wearing a sort of sarong and balancing a pot of fire – real fire, I kid you not – on my head in a faux tropical number called “Princess Papuli” during our Spring show? Or, in the same show, to agree to let my daughter, who was also taking gymnastics classes, to be featured in a solo that included cartwheels and round-offs? These days it’s routine to see competitive skaters do back flips on ice, but then it wasn’t, plus we’re not talking here about a world class athlete who can triple jump in her sleep. We’re talking about a child, my only one, with no spares in the hall closet.
Was it logical to become a charter member in one of the first adult precision teams and practice kicklines with my teammates for hours so we could enter competitions that often had no other adult teams? I still have a video tape of the competition that my in-laws attended. That was the only one time that I fell during our routine. There I am on tape, arm in arm with my teammates, gliding to a T-stop in formation, and suddenly there I’m not! My in-laws REALLY enjoyed that performance.
And speaking of falling, how about the evening I was practicing bunny hops and, oops, found myself lying on the ice, staring at the ceiling but seeing – literally – stars. After sitting in the bleachers for a while to make sure I didn’t have a concussion, was it logical to stand up and get back on the ice?
You bet it was!
Not convinced? OK, I can understand that. So since logic always depends on the assumptions that are the basis for deduction, let’s look at the assumptions I was, and am again making about skating.
Assumption #1: It's important to keep learning new things throughout your life. I first heard that idea when I was maybe 20, from an elderly (i.e., about the age I am now) guy who had recently begun to play the violin. Keep learning new things throughout your life: the idea seemed pretty sensible at the time, and obviously made an impression on me since I still remember it and him.
Assumption #2: We should do what we love regardless of whether we have talent in that area. I heard someone on the radio claim that Bill Clinton once said he had never possessed the courage to venture into areas that didn’t come easily to him, and therefore he greatly admired his daughter for studying ballet even though she really didn’t have any natural aptitude for it. I don’t know if Bill Clinton actually made such a statement, but it was an encouraging thought for this doggedly perseverant no-talent ice skater.
OK, OK, I guess I’m not really sure if figure skating is logical. I am pretty sure, though, that it borders on obsession. And I’m totally sure that I’m really happy to be doing it again, with new solos on the horizon, and new bunny hops to conquer.
And this time, it's no accident!
Tuesday, October 20, 2009
Turn out my what???
You are told to take off your watch and turn off your cell phone and put them into a locker, along with everything else you brought along – backpack, jacket, bike helmet, all of it, except for your driver’s license, which you have to take out of your wallet and hand to the attendant. The attendant locks the door and notes your locker number on a clipboard.
You are instructed to place your bottle of water into a plastic box, and to store your Luna bar and pear on a shelf. The paper towel that you had used to wrap up your pear must be thrown out and replaced with a baggie that they provide.
When you ask if you can keep the paper towel to use as a tissue, the answer is no, they will provide you with that item if needed.
Next you are commanded to turn out your pockets, all five of them, even the teeny coin pocket you hadn’t even noticed was in this pair of jeans. Satisfied that all pockets are empty, the attendant hands you the license and two cards, one with your cubicle number printed on it, the other with the locker letter, and gives you precise directions for how these three items are to be displayed next to your computer.
Another attendant hands you a clipboard and indicates the place for your signature, compares it to the signature on your driver’s license, and closely scrutinizes the picture to make sure it looks like the person standing in front of her. Finally everything is done and it’s time to go into The Room …
… for a CIA interrogation?
… for a meeting with the President?
… for a stay in the slammer?
None of the above. You are here to take your GRE, the Graduate Record Exam required for your application to a master’s program.
For several years I’ve been hearing about the dreaded GRE from applicants to the department where I work, and knew that there were major – and well-founded – concerns about fraud in the test-taking process. Now I was experiencing the result of those concerns first-hand. It’s positively surreal. When you leave The Room for a break (which is only allowed at a specific time regardless of what your bladder would prefer) you have to do the sign-the-log-and-show-your-license routine again. When break time is over, you repeat the process, plus turn out your pockets, again. At the end of the test you go through the whole song and dance, pockets and all, one last time before they return your license and allow you to reclaim your belongings and get out of Dodge.
The Kaplan GRE practice book advises test-takers to keep their composure through the exam, to not panic and rush through the questions for fear of running out of time. It should also say to stay calm and un-intimidated during this intense and somewhat invasive security preparation. The least it could do is advise wearing pocketless pants!
Composure in the days preceding the exam wouldn’t be a bad idea, either. Better than having pre-GRE jitters that shut down your brain. Here’s a short list of items that I lost during the last few days as testing day approached. (I’ll just tell you about the major episodes!)
First I discovered my university ID card was no longer hooked to my key ring because its plastic holder had broken. After calling two stores and driving to every other place I’d gone recently, I found the card on the floor of the car, right under my foot, near the gas pedal.
Meanwhile, though, I had discovered that my backpack hadn’t come home with me, and had rushed off to work hoping I’d left it under my desk and not on the sidewalk next to the bike rack. Hooray, it was safely ensconced in my office. Another near disaster averted.
The next day I couldn’t find my entire set of keys, along with my I-card that was now attached via a new holder, and all that would be a major chore to replace. It includes my house key, two keys for locking my bike, three keys to the Bahá'í Center, and six keys to my office, one of which is the key to our box of keys. Truth!
Since I made this latest loss discovery while rushing to get out the door for an appointment, I had to wait till I came back home to check the shed and see if I’d somehow put my keys in there when I locked up my bike after work. Yup, that’s where I found them, an hour later, sitting safely in my bike basket. Another disaster averted.
Then there was the Case of the Lost Earring.
Earlier that day, when I arrived at work I’d discovered that my right ear lobe was naked. The missing earring was the “dangle” type that can accidentally fall out or be pulled out, so I searched all around my desk and inside my jacket and retraced my path into the building hoping to find it. Nothing. Nowhere. Must have gone to the lost earring room, which is located next door to the room full of one-of-a-pair socks.
A little while later I was talking to a co-worker when she stopped in mid-sentence to ask why I was wearing two earrings in my left ear!
Clearly the prospect of taking the dreaded GRE was deranging what was left of my brain after several days of cramming for the exam. I’d been studying for weeks, but during the last few days had moved that study to the top of my “to do” list, and had been spending every spare minute frantically taking practice verbal tests and reviewing a plethora of vocabulary words – while completely ignoring the preparatory exercises for the quantitative part of the exam.
Why bother? When it comes to algebra and calculus and geometry, not only can I not decipher the answers, I don’t even understand the questions! So I had decided to spend all my study time on the verbal test, where I had a chance to get a decent grade. After all, why should a Master’s program in creative writing care about a silly old math score? Anyway, that’s my reasoning and I hope it’s accurate, because yesterday I sailed through the quantitative section of the exam at the speed of light. Easy to do if you’re not even reading most of the questions!
The computer-based GRE gives you the verbal and quantitative scores immediately upon completion of the exam. For the writing score, which involves actual human beings grading your two essays, you have to wait a couple weeks, so I don’t have my complete results yet, but am happy to report that my verbal score was 660 (out of 800) and my quantitative score was 340. I see applicant GRE scores all the time in my work, so I know that 660 is respectable and 340 is amazing -- for complete guesswork!
Anyway, that hurdle is past now and I can get on to finishing my application, which involves making sure my recommenders get their letters posted well before the deadline, writing a cogent and convincing personal statement about my reasons for applying, preparing an appropriate resumé, and deciding what writing samples to provide that will prove I’m clearly ready to become the Grandma Moses of literature.
(I also plan to write a statement highlighting the fact that my GPA for the courses I’ve taken since 2001 is 3.67 and making a hopefully effective case for ignoring my overall GPA which includes all the courses I took in the 1960’s. It’s a pretty sad GPA. It’s beyond sad. We don’t want even to talk about it!)
In my job I’ve been known to rail against students who start their on-line applications early in the admission season but don’t submit them until the deadline day, when about 75% of all the applications and supporting materials land on my desk. Applications and materials I could have been leisurely preparing for faculty review if they had arrived bit by bit during the last several weeks, but that I now have to rush to completion so those oh-so-eager reviewers – some of them metaphorically sitting on my shoulders as I work – can start evaluating them.
But I’m a reformed woman now. I’ve seen the light and I will never rail again, because now I understand. Finishing the application is scary. Once you hit the submit button, you’re done. Finis. Kaput. For better or worse, you’ve pinned yourself to the wall and there's nothing else you can do to convince your proposed department to accept you as a student. So you put that moment off for as long as possible, and keep the application open and available while you consider whether to change this part or add to that part or delete some other part in order to make it as perfect an application as possible.
But I don’t want some other harried and frantic admissions processor railing against me, so I’m aiming to finish and submit in the next few weeks, at least a month before the deadline. And I promise you, this is the last you’ll have to read about the whole subject until I receive my decision, whatever it is.
And next week I’ll get back to those skating stories. You know, the ones about fire on ice, etc.? Promise.
- 30 -
You are instructed to place your bottle of water into a plastic box, and to store your Luna bar and pear on a shelf. The paper towel that you had used to wrap up your pear must be thrown out and replaced with a baggie that they provide.
When you ask if you can keep the paper towel to use as a tissue, the answer is no, they will provide you with that item if needed.
Next you are commanded to turn out your pockets, all five of them, even the teeny coin pocket you hadn’t even noticed was in this pair of jeans. Satisfied that all pockets are empty, the attendant hands you the license and two cards, one with your cubicle number printed on it, the other with the locker letter, and gives you precise directions for how these three items are to be displayed next to your computer.
Another attendant hands you a clipboard and indicates the place for your signature, compares it to the signature on your driver’s license, and closely scrutinizes the picture to make sure it looks like the person standing in front of her. Finally everything is done and it’s time to go into The Room …
… for a CIA interrogation?
… for a meeting with the President?
… for a stay in the slammer?
None of the above. You are here to take your GRE, the Graduate Record Exam required for your application to a master’s program.
For several years I’ve been hearing about the dreaded GRE from applicants to the department where I work, and knew that there were major – and well-founded – concerns about fraud in the test-taking process. Now I was experiencing the result of those concerns first-hand. It’s positively surreal. When you leave The Room for a break (which is only allowed at a specific time regardless of what your bladder would prefer) you have to do the sign-the-log-and-show-your-license routine again. When break time is over, you repeat the process, plus turn out your pockets, again. At the end of the test you go through the whole song and dance, pockets and all, one last time before they return your license and allow you to reclaim your belongings and get out of Dodge.
The Kaplan GRE practice book advises test-takers to keep their composure through the exam, to not panic and rush through the questions for fear of running out of time. It should also say to stay calm and un-intimidated during this intense and somewhat invasive security preparation. The least it could do is advise wearing pocketless pants!
Composure in the days preceding the exam wouldn’t be a bad idea, either. Better than having pre-GRE jitters that shut down your brain. Here’s a short list of items that I lost during the last few days as testing day approached. (I’ll just tell you about the major episodes!)
First I discovered my university ID card was no longer hooked to my key ring because its plastic holder had broken. After calling two stores and driving to every other place I’d gone recently, I found the card on the floor of the car, right under my foot, near the gas pedal.
Meanwhile, though, I had discovered that my backpack hadn’t come home with me, and had rushed off to work hoping I’d left it under my desk and not on the sidewalk next to the bike rack. Hooray, it was safely ensconced in my office. Another near disaster averted.
The next day I couldn’t find my entire set of keys, along with my I-card that was now attached via a new holder, and all that would be a major chore to replace. It includes my house key, two keys for locking my bike, three keys to the Bahá'í Center, and six keys to my office, one of which is the key to our box of keys. Truth!
Since I made this latest loss discovery while rushing to get out the door for an appointment, I had to wait till I came back home to check the shed and see if I’d somehow put my keys in there when I locked up my bike after work. Yup, that’s where I found them, an hour later, sitting safely in my bike basket. Another disaster averted.
Then there was the Case of the Lost Earring.
Earlier that day, when I arrived at work I’d discovered that my right ear lobe was naked. The missing earring was the “dangle” type that can accidentally fall out or be pulled out, so I searched all around my desk and inside my jacket and retraced my path into the building hoping to find it. Nothing. Nowhere. Must have gone to the lost earring room, which is located next door to the room full of one-of-a-pair socks.
A little while later I was talking to a co-worker when she stopped in mid-sentence to ask why I was wearing two earrings in my left ear!
Clearly the prospect of taking the dreaded GRE was deranging what was left of my brain after several days of cramming for the exam. I’d been studying for weeks, but during the last few days had moved that study to the top of my “to do” list, and had been spending every spare minute frantically taking practice verbal tests and reviewing a plethora of vocabulary words – while completely ignoring the preparatory exercises for the quantitative part of the exam.
Why bother? When it comes to algebra and calculus and geometry, not only can I not decipher the answers, I don’t even understand the questions! So I had decided to spend all my study time on the verbal test, where I had a chance to get a decent grade. After all, why should a Master’s program in creative writing care about a silly old math score? Anyway, that’s my reasoning and I hope it’s accurate, because yesterday I sailed through the quantitative section of the exam at the speed of light. Easy to do if you’re not even reading most of the questions!
The computer-based GRE gives you the verbal and quantitative scores immediately upon completion of the exam. For the writing score, which involves actual human beings grading your two essays, you have to wait a couple weeks, so I don’t have my complete results yet, but am happy to report that my verbal score was 660 (out of 800) and my quantitative score was 340. I see applicant GRE scores all the time in my work, so I know that 660 is respectable and 340 is amazing -- for complete guesswork!
Anyway, that hurdle is past now and I can get on to finishing my application, which involves making sure my recommenders get their letters posted well before the deadline, writing a cogent and convincing personal statement about my reasons for applying, preparing an appropriate resumé, and deciding what writing samples to provide that will prove I’m clearly ready to become the Grandma Moses of literature.
(I also plan to write a statement highlighting the fact that my GPA for the courses I’ve taken since 2001 is 3.67 and making a hopefully effective case for ignoring my overall GPA which includes all the courses I took in the 1960’s. It’s a pretty sad GPA. It’s beyond sad. We don’t want even to talk about it!)
In my job I’ve been known to rail against students who start their on-line applications early in the admission season but don’t submit them until the deadline day, when about 75% of all the applications and supporting materials land on my desk. Applications and materials I could have been leisurely preparing for faculty review if they had arrived bit by bit during the last several weeks, but that I now have to rush to completion so those oh-so-eager reviewers – some of them metaphorically sitting on my shoulders as I work – can start evaluating them.
But I’m a reformed woman now. I’ve seen the light and I will never rail again, because now I understand. Finishing the application is scary. Once you hit the submit button, you’re done. Finis. Kaput. For better or worse, you’ve pinned yourself to the wall and there's nothing else you can do to convince your proposed department to accept you as a student. So you put that moment off for as long as possible, and keep the application open and available while you consider whether to change this part or add to that part or delete some other part in order to make it as perfect an application as possible.
But I don’t want some other harried and frantic admissions processor railing against me, so I’m aiming to finish and submit in the next few weeks, at least a month before the deadline. And I promise you, this is the last you’ll have to read about the whole subject until I receive my decision, whatever it is.
And next week I’ll get back to those skating stories. You know, the ones about fire on ice, etc.? Promise.
- 30 -
Monday, October 12, 2009
The Accidental Athlete, Part 2
Let’s see, where were we? Oh yeah, you wanted to know how skating has come back into my life? Haven’t slept a wink since reading last week’s blog? Had this day circled in bright red on your calendar? Riiiight! Ah, the overwhelming humility of the blog writer!
OK, so since you asked … it started about four years ago, when I looked at the campus rink schedule and saw that there were lunch hour sessions every weekday. I work fairly close to the rink, so this seemed like a good way to get used to being on the ice again. But there were a couple of unexpected problems.
The first was that I could barely manage to get my skates on and tie them properly. I’d been seriously overweight when I first skated but was much more so now, and those additional pounds were getting in the way. Literally.
Skating boots need to be tied tightly, and there are three ways to accomplish that task. I could sit in a bench and put my foot on the floor and bend down to it. Mmmmmph! Unhhh! No good, couldn’t reach that far. Or I could put my foot up on the bench and lean forward and – no way! Or I could stand up and face the bench and put my foot on said surface and lean over my leg to reach my foot. Ouch!
It took quite a while but somehow I managed, with a lot embarrassing grunts and groans, to get my boots tied somewhat less than snugly. However, after maybe 20 minutes of barely moving on the ice (I seem to have forgotten it all and was back to The Wall), it also became clear that the tops of the boots were too tight for comfort on my pudgy legs, and when I removed them I found a nasty looking abrasion on one calf. That was scary for a diabetic who has to be careful about foot and leg injuries so I took the skates home and put them back in the closet to wait for the abrasion to heal before trying again.
And there they sat, forlorn and forgotten, until last year around this time. Because in the interim, I discovered my gallbladder was harboring cancer, and that some of it was sneaking out into surrounding tissue. Surgery and chemo and radiation followed, and while all that was going on my daughter (Remember her? The instigator of this whole skating saga?) was reading books about cancer and nutrition and urging me to consider making some major nutrition changes.
I tried to read a couple of those books along with her, really, I did, but could just never finish them. Too technical. Boring. Lazy brain syndrome, as in “you read them and tell me what they say.” Finally she secured my agreement to read Eat to Live by Dr. Joel Fuhrman, and more specifically to read it cover to cover before making any judgments or decisions about what it recommended. OK, OK, I promise already. She’s still relentless, but manages it with more diplomacy than when she was six.
Plus she knew that in addition to needing to minimize the possibility of recurring cancer, I had another major challenge: discontent about having to add insulin to my diabetic medications. It had happened several months earlier. When my doctor said that dreaded word “insulin,” I felt like a failure. After all, I was a Type II diabetic who could, at least theoretically, control the disease with a healthy diet.
Which is what I was trying to do. Or at least, I was trying not to have an unhealthy diet according to commonly accepted standards. Very little red meat. “Sugar-free” snacks. That kind of thing. Yet my weight and my blood sugar numbers had continued to move up until insulin became a necessity. And a little insulin now was likely to become larger and larger doses in the years ahead, with increasingly higher chances of diabetic complications.
Eat to Live is billed as a weight loss book, which it is, but its larger purpose is weight loss through lifelong nutritional changes in order to correct and forestall major health problems such as diabetes, cancer and heart disease. Bingo, two out of three. I definitely belonged to the book’s target audience. Because of that, and because Furhman’s writing style is conversational and easy to follow and entertaining even when he’s getting into technical details about complicated research studies, I actually read the whole book during one weekend.
About halfway through I was convinced that his advice was sound and do-able and worth trying, but I’d promised you-know-who so dutifully continued reading right through to the last page. Then I got to work. Figured out a basic eating plan. Rid my kitchen of meat and dairy products. Became a regular at the Farmers’ Market, dragging home sacks full of more vegetables than I’d ever thought existed. And cut way back on bread, which was relatively easy since so much of my cheese consumption had been tied to bread and crackers. Because of the cancer I also traded artificially sweetened products for others that were naturally sweetened with agave or fruit juice, for example, and bought mostly organic foods. I’d had enough chemicals squirted into my body in the past few months, thank you.
(About now you are probably wondering whether I have forgotten that this blog is supposed to be about ice skating. Have patience, dear friends, it will all come together. Soon. Promise.)
I was happily surprised to discover that I didn’t miss cheese, formerly one of my staples, and that it was easy to make plant-based meals. I’ve never been much of a cook, more of a put-together-er – open a can of this, stir up a box of that, voila, a meal! Now it was chop a bunch of this, steam a pile of that, mix it all together and dive in.
Within a couple days of filling my body with vegetables and fruits and brown rice instead of bread and cheese and turkey and malitol-filled cookies, I was able to stop taking insulin. This is not an exaggeration. A couple days. Before this diet change my other diabetic medications had no longer been able to control my blood sugar by themselves. Now they could.
Within a few more days my weight started to drop. One pound. Then another. Two more. Could this actually be happening? It could! The scale was telling me a story I had never expected to see again in this life. My weight loss didn’t break any speed records, but it was steady and kept going and going and going until a little more than a year later I was wearing size 10-12 instead of size 22. Which is where I am now. And let me assure you, I’m lovin’ it!
I’m also loving the fact that instead of taking four diabetes pills and a daily insulin injection I’m down to one half of one pill, with blood sugar numbers that make my internist smile.
Meanwhile, back at the ice rink... Bet you thought we’d never get there. Go ahead, admit it!
OK, so last September I returned for another of those noon skates. What a difference! I could actually bend down and properly tie my boots in any of the three positions mentioned above, plus my feet and legs fit the skates better. No more abrasions.
What hadn’t changed, though, was that I still couldn’t skate. My body, vegan diet notwithstanding, had forgotten everything it used to know
Re-learning something is sort of better and sort of worse than learning the same thing from scratch. Unlike my Learn-to-Skate classmates, I am assured that I can do the basic moves because I have done them, to musical accompaniment even, albeit over 20 years ago. This knowledge is a source of both confidence in the future and frustration in the present, but the silver lining is that, with the help of a great coach who has infinite patience, I now have improved on those basics. I have straighter posture and better body awareness, and as I regain my former level I’ll be able to execute maneuvers with more skill and control.
Which is very important, because the way the skaters you watch on TV learned to fly through the air and spin like a top, the way for anyone to learn figure skating at any level, is a very step-by-step process. Each skill, from a lowly one-foot glide to a quadruple axel, builds on skills learned previously, and each is a building block to the next, so it’s important to learn each one well and properly before moving on. Getting to the day when you can figure skate with ease and some element of grace is a slow, laborious process.
Which brings me back to my original question: why am I doing it? There is nothing practical about a sport that requires unique equipment and an artificially created surface, that is an activity most of us can barely manage to approximate when we first try it, and that can only be practiced at specific times which often don’t fit well into work or school or family schedules.
And there’s nothing logical about an accidental athlete in her sixth decade with a lifelong, history of physical cowardice, aspiring to relearn how to spin and jump – teeny tiny half-jumps, but definitely manuevers that involve both feet leaving the ice.
I wonder if a review of skating adventures past will offer some clarity. Adventures like the housekeeper-mouse routine. Or the fire episode. Or the bunny hop that flopped. Or …
To be continued. (Since you asked.)
OK, so since you asked … it started about four years ago, when I looked at the campus rink schedule and saw that there were lunch hour sessions every weekday. I work fairly close to the rink, so this seemed like a good way to get used to being on the ice again. But there were a couple of unexpected problems.
The first was that I could barely manage to get my skates on and tie them properly. I’d been seriously overweight when I first skated but was much more so now, and those additional pounds were getting in the way. Literally.
Skating boots need to be tied tightly, and there are three ways to accomplish that task. I could sit in a bench and put my foot on the floor and bend down to it. Mmmmmph! Unhhh! No good, couldn’t reach that far. Or I could put my foot up on the bench and lean forward and – no way! Or I could stand up and face the bench and put my foot on said surface and lean over my leg to reach my foot. Ouch!
It took quite a while but somehow I managed, with a lot embarrassing grunts and groans, to get my boots tied somewhat less than snugly. However, after maybe 20 minutes of barely moving on the ice (I seem to have forgotten it all and was back to The Wall), it also became clear that the tops of the boots were too tight for comfort on my pudgy legs, and when I removed them I found a nasty looking abrasion on one calf. That was scary for a diabetic who has to be careful about foot and leg injuries so I took the skates home and put them back in the closet to wait for the abrasion to heal before trying again.
And there they sat, forlorn and forgotten, until last year around this time. Because in the interim, I discovered my gallbladder was harboring cancer, and that some of it was sneaking out into surrounding tissue. Surgery and chemo and radiation followed, and while all that was going on my daughter (Remember her? The instigator of this whole skating saga?) was reading books about cancer and nutrition and urging me to consider making some major nutrition changes.
I tried to read a couple of those books along with her, really, I did, but could just never finish them. Too technical. Boring. Lazy brain syndrome, as in “you read them and tell me what they say.” Finally she secured my agreement to read Eat to Live by Dr. Joel Fuhrman, and more specifically to read it cover to cover before making any judgments or decisions about what it recommended. OK, OK, I promise already. She’s still relentless, but manages it with more diplomacy than when she was six.
Plus she knew that in addition to needing to minimize the possibility of recurring cancer, I had another major challenge: discontent about having to add insulin to my diabetic medications. It had happened several months earlier. When my doctor said that dreaded word “insulin,” I felt like a failure. After all, I was a Type II diabetic who could, at least theoretically, control the disease with a healthy diet.
Which is what I was trying to do. Or at least, I was trying not to have an unhealthy diet according to commonly accepted standards. Very little red meat. “Sugar-free” snacks. That kind of thing. Yet my weight and my blood sugar numbers had continued to move up until insulin became a necessity. And a little insulin now was likely to become larger and larger doses in the years ahead, with increasingly higher chances of diabetic complications.
Eat to Live is billed as a weight loss book, which it is, but its larger purpose is weight loss through lifelong nutritional changes in order to correct and forestall major health problems such as diabetes, cancer and heart disease. Bingo, two out of three. I definitely belonged to the book’s target audience. Because of that, and because Furhman’s writing style is conversational and easy to follow and entertaining even when he’s getting into technical details about complicated research studies, I actually read the whole book during one weekend.
About halfway through I was convinced that his advice was sound and do-able and worth trying, but I’d promised you-know-who so dutifully continued reading right through to the last page. Then I got to work. Figured out a basic eating plan. Rid my kitchen of meat and dairy products. Became a regular at the Farmers’ Market, dragging home sacks full of more vegetables than I’d ever thought existed. And cut way back on bread, which was relatively easy since so much of my cheese consumption had been tied to bread and crackers. Because of the cancer I also traded artificially sweetened products for others that were naturally sweetened with agave or fruit juice, for example, and bought mostly organic foods. I’d had enough chemicals squirted into my body in the past few months, thank you.
(About now you are probably wondering whether I have forgotten that this blog is supposed to be about ice skating. Have patience, dear friends, it will all come together. Soon. Promise.)
I was happily surprised to discover that I didn’t miss cheese, formerly one of my staples, and that it was easy to make plant-based meals. I’ve never been much of a cook, more of a put-together-er – open a can of this, stir up a box of that, voila, a meal! Now it was chop a bunch of this, steam a pile of that, mix it all together and dive in.
Within a couple days of filling my body with vegetables and fruits and brown rice instead of bread and cheese and turkey and malitol-filled cookies, I was able to stop taking insulin. This is not an exaggeration. A couple days. Before this diet change my other diabetic medications had no longer been able to control my blood sugar by themselves. Now they could.
Within a few more days my weight started to drop. One pound. Then another. Two more. Could this actually be happening? It could! The scale was telling me a story I had never expected to see again in this life. My weight loss didn’t break any speed records, but it was steady and kept going and going and going until a little more than a year later I was wearing size 10-12 instead of size 22. Which is where I am now. And let me assure you, I’m lovin’ it!
I’m also loving the fact that instead of taking four diabetes pills and a daily insulin injection I’m down to one half of one pill, with blood sugar numbers that make my internist smile.
Meanwhile, back at the ice rink... Bet you thought we’d never get there. Go ahead, admit it!
OK, so last September I returned for another of those noon skates. What a difference! I could actually bend down and properly tie my boots in any of the three positions mentioned above, plus my feet and legs fit the skates better. No more abrasions.
What hadn’t changed, though, was that I still couldn’t skate. My body, vegan diet notwithstanding, had forgotten everything it used to know
Re-learning something is sort of better and sort of worse than learning the same thing from scratch. Unlike my Learn-to-Skate classmates, I am assured that I can do the basic moves because I have done them, to musical accompaniment even, albeit over 20 years ago. This knowledge is a source of both confidence in the future and frustration in the present, but the silver lining is that, with the help of a great coach who has infinite patience, I now have improved on those basics. I have straighter posture and better body awareness, and as I regain my former level I’ll be able to execute maneuvers with more skill and control.
Which is very important, because the way the skaters you watch on TV learned to fly through the air and spin like a top, the way for anyone to learn figure skating at any level, is a very step-by-step process. Each skill, from a lowly one-foot glide to a quadruple axel, builds on skills learned previously, and each is a building block to the next, so it’s important to learn each one well and properly before moving on. Getting to the day when you can figure skate with ease and some element of grace is a slow, laborious process.
Which brings me back to my original question: why am I doing it? There is nothing practical about a sport that requires unique equipment and an artificially created surface, that is an activity most of us can barely manage to approximate when we first try it, and that can only be practiced at specific times which often don’t fit well into work or school or family schedules.
And there’s nothing logical about an accidental athlete in her sixth decade with a lifelong, history of physical cowardice, aspiring to relearn how to spin and jump – teeny tiny half-jumps, but definitely manuevers that involve both feet leaving the ice.
I wonder if a review of skating adventures past will offer some clarity. Adventures like the housekeeper-mouse routine. Or the fire episode. Or the bunny hop that flopped. Or …
To be continued. (Since you asked.)
Monday, October 5, 2009
The Accidental Athlete
I started life as the kid who runs away when the ball comes toward her. Who can’t learn to swim because she doesn’t like to get her face wet (but goes to the pool anyway because BOYS are there). Who didn’t learn to ride a bike until she was nine years old, and then rode it infrequently. Who was always chosen last in gym class – or rather, was reluctantly accepted when there was no one else to choose. After all, no self-respecting and victory-hopeful captain wants the kid who thinks the baseball is her enemy and never manages to touch a racket to a badminton birdie.
With that kind of history, how did I become a senior citizen athlete? Running in 5Ks and even a half-marathon (always coming in last, but finishing every time), biking in long group rides, and now ice skating. Again.
Since you asked, I’ll tell you.
Biking and running started as practical pursuits. During times when I didn’t own a car, either from necessity or by choice, the bicycle became my main mode of transportation, then morphed into a recreational sport a few years ago when I joined a local bike club.
I started running in 1984 – on October 31, to be exact. I know the date because it was the day after I quit smoking. Or rather, the day after the last time I quit smoking. I had quit a few other times but always started again. This time I was quitting with the help of a smoking cessation clinic and wanted it to take, so decided to start running in order to have a new healthy habit that would be jeopardized if I returned to the old unhealthy one.
Although maybe running isn’t quite the right word for what I did that first day. I couldn’t even make it around the block. My friend who lived in the apartment building next to ours said she heard someone wheezing beneath her window that morning, and was amazed when she looked outside and saw it was me laboring to get to the corner. Persistence paid off, however. Eventually I could run for a whole block, then two or three, then a half-mile … etc., etc., etc., to quote the king And participating in 5k events, complements of my employer who sponsored staff teams, also helped the habit replacement theory become reality.
So. Two practical sports, right?
Then there’s ice skating. Once upon a time, in parts of what is now Europe, skating was a way to get from place to place along a frozen river or lake. Now it’s a way to go around and around and around and around an indoor rink. In other words, to go nowhere, while wearing heavy boots connected to a thin middle-of-the-foot blade and attempting to stay balanced on a cold, wet, slippery surface. This was not an activity that appealed to me, and definitely not practical. So how did it become a major hobby? Actually pretty much of an obsession?
Since you asked, I’ll tell you.
It started the weekend my then six-year-old daughter attended her first (and last) Brownie Scout meeting at another’s Scout’s home and left with a pair of ice skates. The host mother had taken one look at my tiny-for-her-age kid, dived into the closet to find the skates her own kid had recently outgrown, and offered them to mine. Which is as much as I know about that meeting, since all I heard afterwards were whenarewegoingskating and canwegotoday and pleasepleasepleasepleaseplease!
Ignoring her didn’t work. Promising we’d go “someday” didn’t work. She was relentless. So the next afternoon found us at the local rink, accompanied by her dad and our neighbor and her son. Dad and neighbor both told me it would be OK, they knew how to skate and would help me.
Notice I wasn’t worried about whether my six-year-old would be OK, I was only worried about me.
And I was right to be worried. Because the minute we all set rental blades to ice, it became clear that neither dad nor neighbor could help anyone. They could barely hold themselves up, but could skate just enough to get from point A to point B and leave me in the dust, or rather the ice vapor. Meanwhile our kids had attacked the ice with innocent, if totally unwarranted, confidence. So there I was, all alone. Just me and the wall.
Ah yes, the wall. You see them at every public skating session, the wall skaters. Clinging desperately to the ledge that holds up the Plexiglas. Mincing carefully along at the speed of a snail. Looking down the whole time to make sure their feet are in constant contact with the ice. Hooray for the wall.
Muttering to myself about the ingratitude of daughters who first badger their mothers into attempting this insane sport and then abandon them, and about the duplicity of husbands and friends who make promises they can’t keep, I managed, with the help of the wall, to get around the near end of the rink, inch by terrifying inch, and to the other end.
Almost.
Because all of a sudden there was no wall. Or rather, the wall was no longer available. Seems some treacherous rink worker had decided to take the hockey teams’ pictures during that particular Sunday public session, and had used a line of orange plastic cones to demarcate a “no skating” zone. And the wall, my lifeline, my savior, my only hope for survival, was in that zone.
Now comes one of the defining moments of my life. How was I going to get off the ice and back to the relative safety of the lobby? My choices were: (a) to wait until husband or friend came by and insist they hold my hand and lead me to the other side of the rink and to the door; (b) get down on all fours and crawl across the ice; (c) stay right where I was for the rest of the public session, another 90 minutes or so, and THEN crawl away; (d) bawl like a baby; or (e) let go of the wall and skate to the other side.
(a) didn’t sound like a very good idea since either of them trying to lead me would probably end with both of us lying on the ice in a tangled heap of bruises and potentially broken bones. (b) didn’t seem a much safer alternative, given the crowd of skaters whizzing by who would be likely to trip over me, or worse, on me. (c) and (d) would only forestall the inevitable. After all, I had to get to other side … someday.
Which left (e). Somehow I gathered up enough courage to remove my hand from that blasted wall and very-carefully-oh-so-slowly-omigod-I’m-actually-doing-it get across the ice, past the cones and the hockey team, and back to the wall on the opposite side. Just me, by myself.
I made it! In one piece!! Without the wall!!! I do believe in miracles, I do, I do, I do.
There was actually one more alternative. (f) I could have asked a skating guard for help. But thank goodness (f) never crossed my mind, because I credit that thousand-mile wall-less trip across the rink, and the surprisingly exhilarating feeling of accomplishment that it engendered, with the decision to register both my daughter and myself for skating classes starting the next week. And in no time flat, we were hooked. For the next several years we took more classes as well as private lessons, performed in local ice shows, and skated in competitions as soloists and on precision teams. And for a couple of those years figure skating, when the above-mentioned dad also became a serious student of the sport, was a total family hobby.
When my daughter reached adolescence her interest in skating withered, and by then husband had also stopped hitting the ice on a regular basis. I kept at it for another year or so, then quit as well. One major reason was money. I just couldn’t afford to keep practicing this relatively expensive sport. Never had been able to afford it actually, just did it anyway. Because it became, as I might have mentioned above, an obsession.
As obsessions go, I suppose this one was relatively healthy and constructive. Daughter, who is now four years older than I was on that history-making Sunday afternoon, says that growing up on ice was one of the better influences in her life. And for me, the accidental athlete, learning one sport at what I thought of then as an advanced age (mid-thirties? riiiiight!) gave me the impetus to try others. (Nothing involving balls, though. Let’s keep some perspective here.)
In the 20-plus years since I stopped skating, there have been many moments when I missed it intensely and thought about starting again, but with money or time concerns, or more urgent priorities (like taking classes to complete my bachelor’s degree), it didn’t seem like the right time. Someday, I’d say. One of these days.
So how did “one of these days” become here and now? Since you asked, I’ll tell you.
Next week.
-30-
Sunday, September 27, 2009
Staying connected
What is our purpose for existence? Why are we here, alive, functioning (sometimes), moving along the path from infancy to old age (most of us), reproducing ourselves (some of us) -- and how does our purpose, as each of us understands it, affect what we choose to do in our lives?
I’ve been thinking about prayer and meditation, and that too little of it was a major factor in the crashing I wrote about last week. Yes, I was very busy for a couple of weeks, and yes, everything in my life just seemed to come together at the same time, and certainly most of my available hours were filled up and overflowing with to-do lists and post-it notes and necessary e-mails, etc., etc., etc. But I’m convinced I would have handled it all much better and more serenely – and more energetically – if I hadn’t stinted on my usual prayer time.
Especially since I don’t spend hours and hours praying every day or every week. More like 30 minutes, max, of spiritually focused quiet time spread throughout the day. As focused as I can manage, anyway.
I wasn’t raised in a religious tradition that included an emphasis on personal prayer, and a few months before I heard about the Bahá'í Faith I came to the conclusion that prayer was silly. After all, God – if there was a God – knew what I wanted so why should He need me to ask him for anything?
Clearly I had a very simplistic idea of the nature of prayer. And it’s taken me many years to get closer to understanding prayer as Bahá’u’lláh defines it: a way to clean the dust and dross of daily life from the soul, like polishing a dusty mirror so it can better reflect sunlight. My understanding is still pretty rudimentary, but at least now I can sometimes tell the difference in my life and my serenity, or lack thereof, according to whether I do or don’t remember to polish the mirror of my own soul.
It’s so easy to do, and also so easy to forget, because I’m definitely inclined more toward doing than being. I put a lot of time and energy into eating right, exercising, working on my various projects, serving the Bahá'í community, helping with my grandsons (my daughter calls it “Grandma Duty”). Shouldn’t all that be enough? Not according to ‘Abdu’l-Bahá.
"The body without spirit is not capable of real accomplishment. Although it may be in the utmost condition of beauty and excellence, it is, nevertheless, in need of the spirit. The chimney of the lamp, no matter how polished and perfect it be, is in need of the light. Without the light, the lamp or candle is not illuminating. Without the spirit, the body is not productive."
So along with everything else, or more accurately, before everything else, I have to make room in my life for a little soul polishing. Have a bit of conversation with God. Get some spiritual nourishment. Slow down. Look inward. Be.
Which is why my cancer adventure was such a wonderful gift. It forced me stop, not just for a few minutes but for six months, all the while not knowing whether this was a hiatus from my regular life or preparation for the end of it. So like many others, I found a great blessing in an experience usually perceived as negative, sad, often unfair -- the blessing of realignment of priorities, of acceptance, of stronger faith, of a better understanding of my purpose.
Now the challenge is to keep and increase the measure of serenity achieved during that time, even in the midst of all my current “doings.” Sometimes, as a way to focus my meditation, I picture a butterfly dancing through space, free, happy, the way I imagine my soul will dance when it is liberated from connection with this body. Because the butterfly, changed so radically from its original state when it emerges from its cocoon, seems a perfect symbol of our own human transformation, and helps me remember that life extends far beyond the initial training-wheel phase of physical existence. That there will be so much more to learn, to do, to be.
One day during surgery recovery, before I knew whether my first post-surgical scan would reveal any new cancer sites, I wrote something that I recently re-discovered and am going to be careful never to lose again. It helps me remember that one day, for at least a few minutes, I understood my purpose.
I am tied to this world, not with thick rope that binds me to it, that would tear off chunks of me as I leave it, but rather with gossamer threads, light and soft as cobweb string, that holds me while I am here and lets me float away in complete freedom when it’s time to go.
-30-
I’ve been thinking about prayer and meditation, and that too little of it was a major factor in the crashing I wrote about last week. Yes, I was very busy for a couple of weeks, and yes, everything in my life just seemed to come together at the same time, and certainly most of my available hours were filled up and overflowing with to-do lists and post-it notes and necessary e-mails, etc., etc., etc. But I’m convinced I would have handled it all much better and more serenely – and more energetically – if I hadn’t stinted on my usual prayer time.
Especially since I don’t spend hours and hours praying every day or every week. More like 30 minutes, max, of spiritually focused quiet time spread throughout the day. As focused as I can manage, anyway.
I wasn’t raised in a religious tradition that included an emphasis on personal prayer, and a few months before I heard about the Bahá'í Faith I came to the conclusion that prayer was silly. After all, God – if there was a God – knew what I wanted so why should He need me to ask him for anything?
Clearly I had a very simplistic idea of the nature of prayer. And it’s taken me many years to get closer to understanding prayer as Bahá’u’lláh defines it: a way to clean the dust and dross of daily life from the soul, like polishing a dusty mirror so it can better reflect sunlight. My understanding is still pretty rudimentary, but at least now I can sometimes tell the difference in my life and my serenity, or lack thereof, according to whether I do or don’t remember to polish the mirror of my own soul.
It’s so easy to do, and also so easy to forget, because I’m definitely inclined more toward doing than being. I put a lot of time and energy into eating right, exercising, working on my various projects, serving the Bahá'í community, helping with my grandsons (my daughter calls it “Grandma Duty”). Shouldn’t all that be enough? Not according to ‘Abdu’l-Bahá.
"The body without spirit is not capable of real accomplishment. Although it may be in the utmost condition of beauty and excellence, it is, nevertheless, in need of the spirit. The chimney of the lamp, no matter how polished and perfect it be, is in need of the light. Without the light, the lamp or candle is not illuminating. Without the spirit, the body is not productive."
So along with everything else, or more accurately, before everything else, I have to make room in my life for a little soul polishing. Have a bit of conversation with God. Get some spiritual nourishment. Slow down. Look inward. Be.
Which is why my cancer adventure was such a wonderful gift. It forced me stop, not just for a few minutes but for six months, all the while not knowing whether this was a hiatus from my regular life or preparation for the end of it. So like many others, I found a great blessing in an experience usually perceived as negative, sad, often unfair -- the blessing of realignment of priorities, of acceptance, of stronger faith, of a better understanding of my purpose.
Now the challenge is to keep and increase the measure of serenity achieved during that time, even in the midst of all my current “doings.” Sometimes, as a way to focus my meditation, I picture a butterfly dancing through space, free, happy, the way I imagine my soul will dance when it is liberated from connection with this body. Because the butterfly, changed so radically from its original state when it emerges from its cocoon, seems a perfect symbol of our own human transformation, and helps me remember that life extends far beyond the initial training-wheel phase of physical existence. That there will be so much more to learn, to do, to be.
One day during surgery recovery, before I knew whether my first post-surgical scan would reveal any new cancer sites, I wrote something that I recently re-discovered and am going to be careful never to lose again. It helps me remember that one day, for at least a few minutes, I understood my purpose.
I am tied to this world, not with thick rope that binds me to it, that would tear off chunks of me as I leave it, but rather with gossamer threads, light and soft as cobweb string, that holds me while I am here and lets me float away in complete freedom when it’s time to go.
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