Deadlines Inc.

My one and only vision

2010-12-12T16:01:00.000-08:00

Some people have visions all the time. Not just people fromeons ago, Old Testament prophets and oracles and such, but perfectly ordinary peoplewalking around in the modern world, living otherwise ordinary lives, shoppingfor groceries and sending text messages and doing cartwheels in their livingrooms …

In other words, my daughter. She’s prone to visions offuture events and she wrote about one of them recently, about the vision shehad of her husband-to-be, a very detailed picture except the face was blank.So when she met said future husband and one day saw him in exactly that samesituation, only now she saw his face, she knew. She KNEW!

She assures me, though, that this happened after she hadstated in her inimitable categoric no-nonsense I-will-brook-no-argument-end-of-conversation waythat he would never ever be The One.

Let’s go back and start this story from the beginning, withmy vision. Along with a lot of other people Heidi and I had attended an all-day meeting andnow were in the car getting ready to visit a local friend for some hang-outtime. David, a new acquaintance, was in our car because we were not local and didn’t know how to getto the friend’s house, so he offered to ride with us and direct us. And it wasin the car when there was this Moment. A very quick, but oh so vivid, sort offlash when I looked at him talking to my daughter and suddenly saw them as ifframed like a photograph. The picture kind of jumped at me as if it lit by astrobe. On, off, just like that.

And just like that, I knew. I really, really KNEW.

So it was no surprise to me after that day to watch the two ofthem became good friends and spend a great deal of time emailing back andforth. (David wasn’t too fond of phones back then.) I’d see Heidi madlykeyboarding and laughing out loud as she answered his latest posts. I didn’tsee what he did while he answered hers, but presumably he was enjoying their communications to an equal degree.

Finally one day, being nosy, anxious to become a grandma,and naturally possessed of the matchmaking gene (probably inherited from some long ago Jewish yenta ancestor), I asked Heidi whether something was going on with her andDavid. We were sitting at the kitchen table in my apartment, and I have a veryclear picture (not a vision, just your every day garden variety memory) of hergiving me the daughter look. You know, the one that says, poor me, woe is me,the long suffering daughter of this relentless, deluded woman. Then she toldme, very sternly and with great emphasis (after she asked me to please stoptrying to matchmake her yet again!), that no, she and David were not a couple,and besides: “Mom, I guarantee you, it will never be David Baker.”

That was about a month or so before they came to all usparents to ask for consent to be married in a Bahá'í ceremony.

Meanwhile, after that conversation I tried my darndest to put the whole idea outof mind. I really tried. I did. Honest. But one night a couple weeks after thekitchen table denial, I woke up from a sound sleep and saw the visionagain and knew, just KNEW, that he really was The One. No matter what she said. Or how firmly she said it. So I got out of bed and wrote his name on a piece of paper and put it in anenvelope and addressed the envelope to myself. Mailed it the next day. Receivedit a couple days later. Put it away unopened.

That’s the envelope Heidi mentions in her blog, the one thatis in her wedding book. She and David have never opened the envelope. They justtake my word about its contents.

Not everyone is so trusting.

A couple weeks after I’d mailed myself the envelope, I wastalking to Heidi’s dad (my once and once again husband, but not at that time) andtold him about my vision and about the sealed envelope with its pre-engagementpostmark date that was proof that the vision had actually happened. Heresponded by laughing with most undignified gusto, and said, “Hah! You probablyhave 16 envelopes with 16 different names in it, and whoever she ends up with,you’ll say, “See, I knew!”’

Now why didn’t I think of that?

An open letter to parents, part 1

2010-10-20T16:00:00.001-07:00

You can't imagine what happened to your daughter or how it happened so quickly. A few weeks ago she appeared to be cheerful and mature and the very essence of functional. Now she can't get up to go to the new job she had pursued and won with such impressive energy and determination. She almost can't get up at all, to do anything. That's just one symptom, one way in which she appears to be falling apart, disappearing into an alien personality. She is even starting to look different, her usual clean, crisp, attractive demeanor replaced by unkempt hair, unwashed skin, a standard wardrobe of dirty, disheveled shorts and t-shirts.

The worst part: she doesn't seem to be aware of her own deterioration. She offers blithe excuses for missing work, and her conversation on the whole has become nonsensical, child-like blabbering such as you've never heard from her before, even when she really was a child. Before she leaves for a weekend in Chicago's Grant Park, where the Grateful Dead will be performing -- suddenly she is a Dead Head, another new development -- she spins crazy fantasies about a plan to make and sell donuts at the event and claims to be sure she will earn big bucks with this spur-of-the-moment venture.

The world has turned on its axis. Your daughter is no longer someone you recognize.

You don't know what is going on or what to do about it. She is, after all, an adult, still young but not under your protection, not even a member of your household. She has her own apartment, although if she doesn't work, can't pay her rent, that might change, and soon.

Then she tells you what happened on that other weekend, a year ago. A long ride with an old classmate. Not even a date, at least not in your mind or, you think, in hers. A weekend you can barely remember because at the time, when she came home, there was no sign that anything had happened at all. She had already submerged the memory of it so successfully she couldn't have told you about it even if you had known to ask.

She tells you now because suddenly the event refuses to stay buried and is forcing its way back through frightening dreams, confusing flashbacks, disorientation, inexplicable psychological pain -- pain that has transformed her into a parody of herself. She tells you now because a good friend has recognized the symptoms and helped her begin to consciously remember. But she can't call it by its right name. She tells a piece of the story, talks around it without ever saying the one word that will make it real. You see that she is still half in denial. Maybe more than half. Painful memory has returned, but perhaps not acceptance of either the memory or the pain.

You want to help, offer to take her back into your home, but with a condition: she has to see a counselor. She agrees. You make an appointment. She doesn't go. You make another one. She thanks you, promises she will be there, but misses that one, too. You can see that there will be no healing until she can bring it all out, talk it all out, but you can't make her go to the appointments.

You have been clear that seeing a counselor is her "rent" for a place to live, and after the fourth mysteriously missed appointment you see that you won't help her by letting her avoid the necessary healing work, by providing the means for her to crawl into another hole and shove the memories back to the place where they can be forgotten again and can continue their insidious poisoning, only to come forward as more and maybe worse dysfunction on other days, in future years.

You tell her she must leave.

Friends who don't know the whole story, who can't know it because it is not your right to tell her story, assume that of course you would never kick out your own daughter, that's not what a good mother does. But you've prayed about it, and discussed it with her father, and despite the other problems that have caused your marital separation, the two of you have agreed. You have to tell her to leave. He has to refuse to let her come to him. To do anything else will not help. To make her go might not help either, might lead to a horrible conclusion, but setting your own boundaries is the only course of action within your control. "God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference."

It is by far the hardest thing you have ever done as a parent. Maybe the hardest thing you have ever done.

She goes, with a plan for what she will do next, although not a plan that makes any sense. But you leave it to her to make a decision and follow through. You pray, a lot. You wait to hear from her. You hope you did the right thing, and still can't see what else you could have done.

Everyone's prayers -- hers, yours, her dad's -- are answered when it almost happens again, this time with someone she barely knows, a friend of the friend who has given her a place to stay. This time she fights him off, her anger from before exploding all around him and chasing him away. Somehow this clears the air in a way that maybe nothing else could. Suddenly she recognizes that rape is the only name for what happened to her and knows she needs help. She makes her own appointments, willingly goes through the pain of disclosure, of psychic re-enactment, of emotional healing.

She becomes herself again, but stronger, calmer, more aware, more mature. Still the whole episode remains a family secret. You can't talk about your experience because that would reveal hers. Then one day, years later, you are astonished to read her latest blog. Seeing that memory revives your own pain and your memory of hers, but you are relieved that now you can share the experience with other parents. Because you know, in this world of confused and misplaced values that result in uncounted experiences of sexual abuse, there are many, many others who will need to hear it.

An open letter to parents, part 2

2010-10-20T15:59:00.000-07:00

Many years after the events that are the subject of Part 1, I wrote and acted the following for a university production about sexual abuse issues. After I left the troupe they included it in a couple more shows, and I had a chance to watch it as an audience member. It seems appropriate to share it here.

HEALING

(They start out standing nextto each other but both facing audience,.

Mother: I hardly recognize her.

Daughter: I hardly recognizemyself.

Mother: It seemed to come out ofnowhere...

Daughter: Nowhere.

Mother: because it’s now a yearsince it happened...and I didn’t even know it had happened at all.

Daughter: How could she knowwhen I didn’t know myself ... until the flashbacks started.

Mother: I thought she was socontent... No, more than that. So happy. Motivated. All of a sudden she becamethe poster girl of positive mental attitude. I was so pleased.Now I think what I was seeing was herdenial, her defense against her own memory..

Daughter: I thought I wasresponsible for it happening ...

Mother: But she seemed so happy.

Daughter: and had to make it goaway ...

Mother: No problems at all.

Daugther: and it did go away ...until the flashbacks started.

Mother: How could I not haveknown something was wrong? Such anabrupt change in behavior. Regardless of the direction of that change, howcould I not have suspected ... something?

Daughter: The next day ...

Mother: There must have been asign...

Daughter: I had already forgotten ...

Mother: something. I should have seen...

Daughter: made myselfforget...

Mother: should have sensed...

Daughter: made it never havehappened...

Mother: something.

Daughter: even while itwas happening.

Mother: Something.

Daughter: I could not letmyself believe it.

Mother: And now I hardlyrecognize her.

Daughter: And now I can’t stopremembering...

Mother: It’s like she’s beenturned inside out. She doesn’t goto work, doesn’t care how she looks ...

Daughter: and I can’t think ofanything else.

Mother: ... and she might be onsomething. I don’t know how tohandle... I have to get her to someone...

Daughter: I just want to forgetagain.

Mother: Someone who will knowwhat to do, someone she can talk to...

Daughter: I can’t talkabout it.

Mother: someone who can draw itout of her...

Daughter: If I start, I won’t beable to stop. It will all comepouring out...

Mother: Like poison from awound.

Daughter: Like poison from awound.

Mother: (to daughter) Please,get help.

Daughter: I can’t face it.

Mother: It was not your fault.

Daughter: I feel so dirty.

Mother: You did not askfor it.

Daughter: I just want to forget

Mother: Remember.

Daughter: Any way I can.

Mother: Remember.

Daughter: It never happened.

Mother: Talk.

Daughter: I can’t.

Mother: Heal.

Daughter: (to the mother) I’mafraid.

Mother: Believe it.

Daughter: I don’t know.

Mother: Believe it.

Daughter: If I let it out?

Mother: Yes.

Daughter: If I ask for help?

Mother: Yes.

Daughter: If I remember?

Mother: It will lose it’s power.

Daughter: Healing will begin?

Mother: Yes.

Daughter: (facing audience) Howcan I begin to say it all, out loud, to anyone?

Mother: (facing audience) Itwill be so hard ...

Daughter: I can’t do it.

Mother: But not talking aboutit, pretending it didn’t happen, pretending to forget ...

Daughter: What else can I do?

Mother:... will keep it rightthere, right inside you, like poison in a wound.

Daughter: Like poison in awound.

Mother: (facing daughter)Remember.

Daughter: Any way I can.

Mother: Remember.

Daughter: It never happened.

Mother: Talk.

Daughter: I can’t.

Mother: Heal.

Daughter: (to the mother) I’mafraid.

Mother: Believe it.

Daughter: I don’t know.

Mother: Believe it.

Daughter: If I let it out?

Mother: Yes.

Daughter: If I ask for help?

Mother: Yes.

Daughter: If I remember?

Mother: It will lose it’s power.

Daughter: Healing will begin.

Mother: (facing audience) Yes.

Daughter: (facing audience) Yes.

Who is what?

2010-03-26T23:58:00.000-07:00

It's going to be a busy weekend, with not much writing time, so I'm offering the following piece I composed and performed for a workshop production at the University of Illinois in October 2006. If the subject interests you, I recommend a new book by an old friend. You can read about it and order it at http://www.storiesofracialhealing.com/.

Whatever else we can say about racism and race relations in the U.S., outside of all the confusions and conclusions and the psychic contusions that the subject causes, leaving aside the causes espoused by various groups and factions, and the questions of what is fiction and what is fact, beyond all that at least one thing is clear and self-evident – that we know who is who, me and you, who is White and who is Black.

Don’t we?

I say I am White. My six year old grandson, looking at me without the aid of bone-deep knowledge of our skewed history, says I am peach. Each of us on this stage tonight is a different color, a different shade on the spectrum from light to dark, from peach to brown, yet we choose to simplify and amplify and defy reality by calling ourselves, merely, Black and White.

If only it were that easy.

A neighbor, a woman of color – in her case a mellow, slightly reddish brown – and a woman whose sympathetic and empathetic brown face attracts trust and confidence – this woman once told me that she often meets others, clerks in stores, for example, men and women with light complexions, who suddenly lean in to her and tell in her low voices, in careful whispers, after looking around to make sure they can’t be overheard, that actually, really they are Black, but no one else here knows that.

“It’s amazing,” my friend says, “how many people are passing.”

“Really?” I say, amazed. “I’ve never met one.”

Not one of the smartest statements I’ve made in my life.

But what do these people mean when they call themselves Black? They don’t mean skin color. Theirs doesn’t qualify. They must mean something else, or maybe a lot of somethings else, a shared history, a group membership, a heritage, an assumed set of characteristics? All that and more seems to be inherent in the simple color name, Black.

White, on the other hand, means what? When I hear that designation, do I hear a shared history, a group membership, a heritage, an assumed set of characteristics? No. All I hear is Not Black. And that only if Black is nearby, to be compared against.

I met a young man on a bus one day. We started talking, about who lived where, who worked at what, that kind of thing. He was a fair-skinned man, with straight brown hair, unremarkable features, just an ordinary, everyday sort of White guy look. Then he mentioned – and I don’t remember why, it was just a comment that fit in to the conversational topic of the moment – he mentioned, in a casual way, that one of his parents was White and one was Black. In the twinkling of an eye, faster than it took Cinderella’s coach too turn back into a pumpkin at the stroke of midnight, that man changed right before my eyes. He became Black. Just like that.

Not one of the proudest moments of my life.

What do my eyes see? What my grandson’s eyes see, simply skin color? No, I see categories called Black and White regardless of the colors that are actually in front of me. I see a light-skinned friend of African ancestry as Black, and a dark-skinned friend with Mediterranean genes as White, because I place significance on those designations. Significances that I’ve learned through growing up in a society shaped and defined by those man-made, self-serving, economically useful significances.

A Chinese girl came to the university department where I work, looking for Dr. Anderson. We had three Dr. Anderson’s on our faculty, which one did she want? She wasn’t sure. She didn’t know his first name. His. OK, that narrowed it down to two. Did she know what he looked like. He’s tall, she said. No help there. Finally after a little more prodding, she came up with a descriptive characteristic that worked. He’s very dark, she said, his skin, very dark. Aha, mystery solved. She didn’t want any of our Dr. Andersons at all, she wanted the one who is head of another department in our college. The Black Dr. Anderson. I directed her to that office, one of hundreds of students I’ve seen and served, but one I’ll never forget. Because she saw the same dark skin I saw, but she didn’t see the same significance of that color, so his skin tone was way down on her list of identifying characteristics.

And what of my identifying characteristic, and that of most of my fellow Americans? The characteristic that defines us, the one that limits us and shames us and enslaves us, is our persistent, pervasive, unshakeable insistence on seeing everyone in terms of the meaningless, erroneous, and simply untrue categories we call Black and White.

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Doors: a personal note

2010-03-22T05:46:00.000-07:00

Since I know a lot of you are waiting to hear about the result of my application to graduate school, and because I am inexpressibly grateful for your support, the first thing on today’s agenda is to tell you that the letter came and, as I expected, my application was not accepted. It was a pleasant and encouraging letter, very similar to the ones I send every year to about 90% of the students who apply to the graduate program in the department where I work. As with this whole experience, from GRE exam through getting recommendation letters to final decision, it has been an interesting and instructive adventure to be on the other side of such a familiar fence.

So many people were sure I would get accepted that it was quite gratifying to my writer’s ego, even while I knew – both as a writer and as an admissions coordinator – that the chances of that happening were low. Remember limbo contests? How low can you go? I knew that the probability of acceptance, for me or any candidate, was very very very low, for a variety of reasons. I also knew that the English Department most likely had received a high number of applications this year. The prevailing wisdom says that when the economy goes down, grad school apps go up. If the letter had said I was accepted, I would probably have fainted from sheer shock before I finished reading it. Finally getting the word hurt, but it was more of a sting than a slap.

It was also a release. Other options that I had put in a mental pending file can now be pulled out of the drawer and more carefully considered. I tried to submit the best application possible so have to acknowledge, with joy rather than sorrow, that graduate school, at least in this particular time and place, is not the door that is open to me, and that a closed door over there simply means another door will be open over here. And that God knows which door is the right one for me and for whatever avenues of service are tagged with my name.

These thoughts connect well with the ones I had already started writing for this week’s blog. Due to a Facebook conversation, I had been thinking about the

Bahai belief that there are two simultaneous processes going on in today’s world, one destructive of old ways of thinking and behaving and one constructive, which includes many things that many people are doing to create new building blocks of civilization.

My understanding of this view is that these two processes are as logical for world progress as they are for personal growth and change. For a prosaic example, if I want a new kitchen, I first have to tear apart my old kitchen (the destructive process) to make space to build something better (the constructive process). And during the transition between these two processes I have to live with necessary chaos and inconvenience In that light, the destructive process is a painful but positive step.

On a more personal level, if I want to make space for new spiritual growth I have to be willing to let go of old thoughts and behaviors, to leave and if necessary destroy my comfort zone (the spiritual equivalent of an old, no longer functional kitchen). If an old pattern of thought and action is clearly not working, I need to let it self-destruct while I focus my energies on building new habits. If I ask God for a specific favor, even one that appears inherently beneficial, and the answer is “no,” I need to be grateful for that answer and ready to understand the guidance it provides for other paths of service.

Looking at the world situation in this way can help me stay sane on a planet that seems to be going bonkers. I can choose to focus on building new structures, new patterns, new ways of relating, and (to borrow a Twelve Step program phrase) to “let go and let God” deal with clearing away the rubble of the old. As a member of the Bahá'í comunity, this means doing my part to help develop a spiritually based governmental model that places priority on justice and unity rather than winning power through warring factions. It also means focusing on my participation in, and growing understanding of, our mission to learn and teach specific skills for human interaction, skills that help individuals begin to see themselves as noble beings created to serve one another. I believe and see solid evidence that this task we have been given is ultimately the way to begin changing civilization, from the bottom up.

Whether the mechanism is described as one door closing so another can open, or twin processes of destruction and creation, what it all means to me is accepting the events of my life and moving forward with confidence that the right path will become clear, so long as I keep my eyes, my mind, open.

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Modems, maids and mice

2010-03-15T02:50:00.000-07:00

How, you might be wondering, am I going to meld three words that share nothing but a beginning “M” into one blog? How indeed? Since you asked, I’ll tell you.

Let’s start with modems, or more specifically, my DSL modem that just suddenly decided to kick the bucket a few nights ago. Earlier that same evening, my cell phone had also died, or so it seemed. The normal display was replaced by a picture of a battery, and the danged thing refused to charge, or start, or do anything. Since we no longer have a land line in our home, a working cell phone is a necessity, so I told my husband I’d be going to the AT&T service center to get a new phone.

That’s what I told him, that’s not what I did. I was recovering from a brief bout of the usual nameless bug (the one that’s always “going around”), had come home early from work and retired to the couch, and just couldn’t work up enough angst about the phone to get dressed again and leave the house.

A couple hours later I discovered that my modem was also among the deceased and had to call the technical service people for assistance. I could manage that, it didn’t involve going anywhere. Of course, I would need a phone to do it and was gong to use my husband’s when suddenly my own phone came back to life. Kind of miraculous, no? OK, maybe not. But it does confirm one of my long held beliefs: that the various kinds of machines and devices that we use to operate our lives secretly communicate with one another.

I became aware of this phenomenon back around 1991 when I was working as a typesetter in a small shop in Evanston, IL. This was in the days before desktop publishing appeared and led to a graphics-capable computer in every home becoming the order of the day. Now just about anyone can produce basic typeset materials – flyers, for example, or newsletters, signs, whatever – because the programming to do that is a standard computer feature.

But in tech world 19 years ago is the dark ages, so instead of modern do-everyhing-except-cook-dinner computers, our shop had three dedicated Compugraphic typesetting machines and another very large photoprocessor that sucked in the film produced by the Compugraphics, moved it through a long channel (5 feet long, maybe 6) of photo developing mechanisms and fluids, and spit finished type out the other end.

This machine was essential to our operation. We could typeset our fingers to the bone but wouldn’t have a product to give our customers if all those keystrokes couldn’t be translated into paper that could be cut and pasted to make masters for brochures and such. And Mr. Photoprocessor knew how important he was to the business and generally managed to break down or jam up or whatever only on days when we had major jobs due.

It was obvious, at least to me, that after we turned off the lights and locked the doors at 5:00 p.m. every day, the Compugraphics and their buddy consulted about whether the next day would be a good one for a work stoppage. Not much due? Keep running smoothly. Urgent deadline? Go on strike. Or not. If they were feeling charitable, the processor would keep functioning and let us finish the job on time.

So I wasn’t at all surprised last week when my phone and modem conferred and decided to provide phone service so I could call AT&T and find out what to do to get back online.

That typesetting shop was a small place, just four full-time employees including the owner, and for a while, one part-timer, a student from Northwestern University. Can’t remember his name. Let’s call him Reginald. Reginald was from Seattle or Portland or somewhere like that, came from a prosperous family and was only working for extra spending money.

One day when we were typesetting a job in Spanish and talking about our various language capabilities, Reginald casually mentioned that he could speak a little Spanish. Not much. Just enough to talk to his family’s maid. The rest of us were stunned into silence as we contemplated the kind of lifestyle that would include casual mentions of a maid. Fortunately I don’t think Reginald noticed that he had suddenly become the shop freak.

Having a maid would not be easy for a lot of us. A woman who lived in Barbados for a couple years once told me about having a maid there. She didn’t particularly want or need a maid, but if she, an American, didn’t hire one it would be considered very bad form, since she would be denying a job to someone who needed it and flouting the local culture.

She had a full-time job as a teacher and you might think she would have enjoyed the new experience of not needing to do housework in the evenings, but instead she was often at loose ends with too much free time. Plus, she said, it was hard for her to relate to the woman she had hired. She tried to be friendly with her and the woman made it very clear that Barbados protocol demanded a hierarchal employer-employee relationship.

I thought about all this when the student who has been coming to my home for two hours every Friday to provide housecleaning services asked if this week she could come on Saturday instead. Which was fine, except that would mean I might be here at the same time. Ordinarily I come home from work and voila, the kitchen floor is shiny, the bathroom sparkles, the living room is swept and dusted and much neater than I left it that morning. I’ve become used to that, and I’m lovin’ it. But if I’m home when she comes, like I was one day a few weeks ago, it seems very strange to actually see someone else cleaning my house. I feel like I should apologize, or jump in and help, or insist she sit down for a cup of tea. So on Saturday, I made sure she was coming during a time I wouldn’t be there and couldn’t engage in guilty hovering.

OK, how am I doing so far? I’ve covered modems and maids, now how about mice? That’s easy. Have you seen the email that is going around about the mouse who was caught in the computer printer? It includes a picture of his little mouse head, looking dazed and amazed, sticking out between the rollers. That picture (attached here) inspired a conversation with a co-worker about our shared terror of mice. We both admitted to becoming completely unglued at the sight or sound of a teeny tiny rodent, alive or dead. I’ve been known to run screaming through the house because I reached down into a closet to put something away and touched a furry little body. Dead. Not moving. Couldn’t do a thing to me.

Didn’t matter.

And there was the time I hid for 15 minutes in a bedroom while our four cats (not our current four cats, an earlier contingent) batted around a mouse who had very stupidly wandered into our home. My husband couldn’t get to the mouse to toss it out, under threat of being scratched to death by those suddenly vicious felines, so he just watched and transmitted a play-by-play color commentary until the mouse lost 4-to-1 and was gone, and it was safe for me to come out of the bedroom.

Another time, in a different place, there was a mouse that ran behind the TV every night at the same time, so fast my daughter and I never really saw it, just saw a shadow streak past. That I could live with. When the mouse ran itself into oblivion and was discovered lying dead on the floor, I started running instead and pounding on the maintenance man’s door in total panic.

So here’s what I figure. The mouse in the picture was invading the office of a maid service, and the printer conspired with the computers and the copier to nab it and present it to the office staff first thing in the morning. On the busiest day of the week, no doubt.

There. Told you I could do it!

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Settling in for the ride

2010-03-07T07:27:00.001-08:00

Week 3 down, 13 to go. After a slightly bumpy take-off, yesterday we started to settle in for what looks like a smooth and pleasant ride.

What in the heck am I talking about, you are wondering? Since you asked, I’ll tell you. The subject is the Soul Miners Children’s Theatre Company of Champaign-Urbana. A couple weeks ago I described how it started but not much about what it is. Sort of left it as a “to be continued,” because that’s how I felt, like I had just stepped onto a new road and didn’t know where it was taking me.

Kind of like life, huh?

OK, OK, enough glib profundity, let’s get on with the story.

Soul Miners joins a virtues class to theatre arts classes in order to create a spiritually oriented theatrical production company. An account of today’s session should help shape that definition into a more concrete picture.

Heidi and I arrived at the Bahá'í Center in Urbana around noon yesterday (Saturday) to prepare the space for the children who would be coming soon. At a little after 1:00 p.m., the virtues class began. First the students listened to a story and then consulted to figure out the virtue that would be the subject of the class. (Today’s virtue was “determination,” one of the 13 virtues that are expressed in the story we will be presenting on stage. There are probably more than that, but we stopped at 13 because we have 13 weekly virtues classes in our schedule.) During the rest of the class the children studied a couple of quotations about determination, then pasted copies into their books. Each student has a big photo album that they will take home when the term ends, albums filled with pictures they drew and quotations from both eastern and western religious texts and from other inspirational sources. They also played a game, talked, and generally kept busy learning about determination through a variety of activities.

Yesterday’s class was taught by two of the parents. Parent and non-parent volunteers are the scheduled teachers for the next 10 weeks, with as much overlap as possible to preserve consistency for the students.

At about 2:00 p.m. the kids separated into two groups by age, to work with our theatre arts teachers, Katie and Sarah, enthusiastic young women with experience and training in both theatre and working with children. For a necessarily small stipend they have taken on a big job – melding 10 children into a skilled performance troupe. Their charges, ranging from 6-10 years old, are a diverse group of girls and boys from different racial and ethnic categories, from different schools and home schooling, with different religious backgrounds. Some were well acquainted before Soul Miners started, some never met before.

In the workroom formatting a parent contact list, I heard lots of laughter and movement. Curious, I poked my head into the closest class and saw 6 children, a teacher and a parent volunteer sitting in a circle playing “telephone,” with the emphasis on learning how to speak clearly and distinctly for audiences.

After the first hour of theatre arts class, it was snack time. Complements of still more volunteers, the children replenished their energy with apples and applesauce, nuts and peanut butter, raisins and carrots and hummus and home-baked gluten-free cookies. It was an amazingly orderly snack break, because in order to eat the kids had to sit quietly and wait to be served. Heidi’s idea. Impressive!

Then it was time to jump up and get moving again, as the younger and older age groups switched teachers to continue theatre arts training for another hour, followed by the last activity, a 20-minute appreciation session. Sitting in a circle of chairs in a room that was set up with dim lighting and soft background music, children and teachers and parents related what they had liked about the day and expressed gratitude for specific acts of service or helpfulness or public struggles to overcome personal challenges.

By now it was almost 5:00 p.m., the end of a long afternoon, but no one seemed in any hurry to leave. The playroom filled up with kids dealing Uno cards and creating dollhouse families, a small group of parents and teachers discussed how to handle one child’s needs in ways that would help both him and his classmates, one parent wrote a check for tuition while getting a full report from her daughter about the day’s activities, and another student read and signed his commitment statement.

Yep, you read that correctly. We are asking all the children to make a promise in writing to the theatre company and to themselves. In the statement that they sign, they commit to their best efforts at working with others cooperatively and lovingly, to pay attention, to show up every week and participate in performances, and also to acknowledge that they are making a commitment for which they are personally responsible.

There are a couple of reasons for these statements. One is simply that we need a consistent group in order to mount a theatrical production. But beyond that, Heidi and I have strong anecdotal evidence of the value of a child’s personal commitment. (I can tell you my recollections of this story because she published hers recently in her own blog.)

When Heidi was in eighth grade in Evanston, IL, her teachers recommended her for a local program called Earn and Learn, which tied school performance (defined by whatever each student needed for academic or social or behavioral improvement) to the opportunity to meet at an after-school worksite and earn money by doing work for local businesses. Students and parents were invited to an informational meeting, and at the end of the meeting, kids who wanted to be in the program were required to sign a personal commitment statement, and parents were asked to help their children honor that commitment.

Our daughter loved the first Earn and Learn event, a camping trip, but after one day on the job she hated the whole thing and vowed never to return. “Vowed” meaning hollered. She was absolutely, positively, in no way whatsoever going back, and that was that! Except she had signed that piece of paper and we had agreed to it, so the next day we literally high-jacked her after school and drove her to the work site, despite blood curdling screams and kicking of dashboard and threats of mayhem. Seeing she had no choice by the time we arrived, Heidi scowled and growled out of the car and into the work site. I don’t know what Rick, the guy in charge, said or did, but within a few minutes she was laughing and ready to roll. That year in Earn and Learn was one of her best experiences and a major contributor to the person she is today. Without her commitment statement, it wouldn’t have happened. And without the Earn and Learn experience, our Soul Miners venture probably would not be happening, either.

Because although the initial idea for this theatre venture was mine and we worked together for several months on the investigation and learning and planning phases, now that we are in operation as an actual school, Heidi is the lynchpin. She’s planning the virtues classes and scheduling volunteers and overseeing the afternoon’s rotation, attending to myriad details that I wouldn’t know how to handle or even know were needed. So Heidi, this is my very public statement of appreciation. Please ignore me when I get grumpy or impatient and know how thankful I am for your spirit and enthusiasm and skill.

So … back to the present. Week 3 down, 13 to go. As we progress through the term the theatre arts classes will increasingly become rehearsals for our first production, a musical adaptation of Dr. Seuss’s Horton the Elephant story, provided by the New York Children’s Theatre Company. The various parts and pieces of each Saturday’s activity will be tied together by the virtues exemplified in the tale of an elephant keeping a most un-elephant-like promise because “an elephant’s faithful, one hundred percent.” (That was last week’s virtue, faithfulness.)

Week 14 will be devoted to final rehearsals, with maybe a week 14-1/2 rehearsal thrown in for good measure if needed. Weeks 15 and 16 will be performance weekends, two shows each. Then a closing celebration, and a metaphorical long nap for you-know-who before we continue our planning for the next term.

Soul Miners is not a business – tuition and ticket revenue will be used only to pay theatre arts teachers, rent performance spaces, buy supplies and cover other necessary expenses – but it is a very serious venture that we hope will be as successful as the original, award-winning New York group. Even half as successful would be fantastic! After all, we have a modest agenda: providing spiritual education, promoting religious unity as well as just about any other unity you can name, developing talent, producing great shows with both substance and style. That’s all.

Week 3 down. 13 – and many more – to go.

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A Holiday Gift

2010-02-28T18:49:00.000-08:00

Holidays are interesting phenomena. So routine and at the same time so special. By routine, I guess I mean predictable. Each holiday, from Halloween to Christmas to Valentine’s Day, comes at the same time every year, is identified by the same ceremonies and/or activities, inspires advertisements for the same kinds of food, and provides similar shared memories for members of the groups (families, towns, national cultures) who celebrate them. I have never understood why people are so fond of all this sameness.

OK, maybe “never” is a more than slight exaggeration. After all, I was a kid once, many long years ago, and back then I certainly loved the sameness of Chanukkah – lighting the candles every night for eight nights, followed by a different small gift each night – and was never bored by the same annual Purim carnival at the synagogue with all of us kids dressing up as our same favorite characters from the Book of Esther and boisterously shaking the same gragors every time the evil name of Haman was heard in the megillah reading.

Our family even had a small Christmas tradition. I don’t know why. We certainly didn’t believe that Jesus Christ was the Son of God. In fact, judging from my Sunday School and later Hebrew School lessons, it seems we didn’t even believe He had ever existed, since despite the major part Christ played in Jewish history, He was never mentioned.

Still, Christmas permeates the season so completely that hardly anyone can be immune to it, belief or no belief. Apparently my mother thought we should do a little something to mark the day. No tree, of course. (Already told you that story.) No big gift opening ritual. No strings of lights or Christmas dinner. But yes to “stockings hung by the chimney with care.” Since we didn’t have a chimney, she would hang stockings from a table in the living room and fill them with nuts and chocolate and oranges. And yes to Santa Clause, at least the department store Santa Clause. We have several photos of my sister and I sitting on Santa’s lap. The two of us looked so much alike that in one of those old pictures we are not sure which one of us was the subject of the moment. My super curly hair should have given it away, but the little girl in that photo is wearing a concealing hat, and the coat was one my sister inherited after I outgrew it, so it could be either one of us. And of course, there’s no clue in the photo’s other subject. Santa always looks the same!

That was the only non-Jewish holiday we observed in any way, except for holidays not tied to any particular religion, such as Mothers Day and the Fourth of July. And I definitely did not mind seeing the same fireworks year after year.

You might recall that I ranted on about the evils of sameness in another blog a while back. In response, a good friend offered an alternate view. “That is the real beauty of tradition, that it gets us to thinking about the past and all we have to be grateful for, the large crowd of witnesses that went before us. And if we are thinking about such things it gets us off of the American obsession with self, which has to be a good thing.”

And you know, I think he’s right. There is a value to creating a comfortable space for celebration and observance of important days. I think my problem is more accurately with advertising, with the huge role marketing plays in promoting and creating our national sense of what is right and proper – and expected -- for each holiday. All those advertisements on TV and in newspaper inserts practically mandate how we should feel and what we should do for each holiday, whether it’s eat hot dogs or sip champagne, celebrate indoors or out, rush to the nearest store to buy straw baskets or strings of colored lights. It seems, at least to me, that our national holiday celebrations have become externally imposed to the point that many of us feel compelled to follow the established program and reluctant to try anything different.

There I go, ranting again.

The catalyst this time around came from all the lovely Facebook entries posted by Bahá'í friends about what they were doing to celebrate Ayyám-i-Há, our end of February gift-giving, party-throwing, charity-offering holiday that precedes a fasting period and the start of our new calendar year on March 21. I read about an Ayyám-i-Há pancake party in one friend’s status, an afternoon spent delivering gift baskets in another, a children’s party, a masquerade ball, an interfaith dialogue and dinner, and a celebration concert. One posting included a sample of Arabic calligraphy as a gift to other FB friends, another offered a link to a video and article about a gallery opening. Diversity to the max!

It would actually be much easier for me if we did have set patterns for observing Ayyám-i-Há, because I’m not very adept at coming up with ideas or even, some years, remembering that a holiday is on the horizon. This was that kind of year. During December, influenced by Christmas frenzy, I had grandiose intentions for big doings this week. However, when February actually arrived, my attention was totally absorbed in a couple major projects, and since the world-at-large wasn’t helping me along with a barrage of Ayyám-i-Há commercials and Ayyám-i-Há advertisements and Ayyám-i-Há TV shows and Ayyám-i-Há street decorations (what an image!), my good intentions fell flat.

Heck, I almost forgot to get presents for my grandsons!

And now Ayyám-i-Há is almost over – it ends at sunset on March 1 – but it’s not too late yet. I have one special gift ready to impart: a big, brightly wrapped box of GRATITUDE to all of you steadfast (but hopefully not too long-suffering) friends who read my blog, week after week, even the not-so-hot efforts. Blogging is, after all, a rather self-indulgent endeavor, and it’s pure delight to be able to ramble on about one’s own interests and find an audience of kindred souls who are willing to spend a few minutes reading all that rambling, and often even responding to it with insightful comments and shared observations.

I’m also grateful for all the overwhelming encouragement many of you gave me when I applied to graduate school. Starting tomorrow, I’ll be watching the mail for the promised March decision to tell me whether I’ve been admitted. I’m not holding my breath. That’s not a statement of pessimism, I just know too much about the grad school admissions process after working with it for almost nine years. Even the world’s most qualified applicant – which I can guarantee you I’m not – can be rejected, for a variety of reasons: because her preferred advisor isn’t currently taking new students, or because her academic goals don’t fit well with the department’s program, or because her reference letters aren’t strong or specific enough, or simply because the competition is too stiff. Whatever my letter says when it comes, it’ll be OK. The experience was a good one regardless of result, and not the least because of your confidence and support.

Julie Powell, author of “Julie and Julia,” coined a name for her blog readers. She called them “bleaders.” So to my own wonderful bleaders, let me just end by saying …

Happy Ayyám-i-Há to all. And to all, a good night.

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Out of the starting gate at last

2010-02-21T19:34:00.000-08:00

Saturday morning, February 20

TODAY’S THE DAY.

Today’s the day that echoed through my prayers almost three years ago, prayers for guidance about what to do with my life now that I had it back. Now that energy would start replacing the chronic exhaustion caused by daily radiation treatments and chemicals dripping through my veins 24 hours a day. Now that I could get off the couch and make plans, execute plans, turn plans into actual activities.

But what plans? During the Summer and Fall before the cancer was discovered, with my class work for my 44-yeear bachelor’s degree almost completed, I had dived back into the theatre world with a vengeance – acting in two plays, producing an experimental workshop performance about racism, and directing an original one-act for a university group. So as I looked forward to the end of treatments, at first I assumed that now I would head back to that diving board and jump into those same waters headfirst.

Maybe not jump exactly, since the cancer center doctor had cautioned against impeding my body’s healing by doing too much too soon. But at least put a toe in and wade a little away from shore. So the question wasn’t what I would do -- I knew what I wanted to do -- it was how soon and how much.

Until a little voice, or sense, or feeling, or whatever it is that niggles its way into our thoughts, surprised me with a most unexpected message. It went something like this:

No.

That was it, just No.

No, I should not start auditioning again. No, I should not channel my now cherished time and energy into traditional theatrical endeavors, into the immense time commitments necessary to put myself on stages. Stages that gave me tremendous ego satisfaction but were not likely to help society progress in ways that seemed significant to me. That’s what I was hearing, though it wasn’t anything l had expected to hear.

I think that having spent many more hours in prayer and meditation during the last few months than ever before, my spiritual antennae had become a tad more sensitive. And those antennae were waving around and picking up new signals that reminded me service was my purpose, the reason I was still on the planet. Service. Not ego gratification, not applause, not theatre simply for the sake of theatre.

Nothing was wrong with any of that, it just – and I recognized this with certain if bewildered clarity – it just was not for me, now, at this moment. And that was when the mysterious little voice-sense-feeling whispered children’s theatre and spiritual education, and I caught the first faint scent of Today,

Theatre connected to spiritual education? I liked the idea. In fact, it was a good description of a project that I had long considered my absolute favorite theatre experience. This goes back 30+ years ago to a time when I was performing with New Day Chatauqua, a repertoire troupe that combined art with mission. A small group of friends with diverse talents produced shows that artistically presented spiritual themes. That was the one time in my life when the demands of theatre work did not detract from other priorities, but instead combined with and supported them. And I had always wanted to have that experience again.

But a children’s theatre dedicated to children’s spiritual education. Come on, little voice, get real. I don’t know anything about dealing with children. One on one, sure, that’s OK, after all I had raised a child. But one kid is not the same as a group of kids, a noisy, energetic, irrepressible, sometimes even intimidating bunch of young’uns. Never been any good with that. Too bad, said the voice. Do it anyway.

My only model for the kind of children’s theatre concept that was tiptoeing around my brain was a New York City project that I had read about, a group that teaches kids from a variety of racial backgrounds and economic levels to produce award-winning theatre while expressing spiritual values and making important social observations. That was all I knew about it, but it was enough to define a vague goal to start a similar group here in little old Champaign-Urbana.

Initially, though, some preliminary steps would be required. Step one, get to know some kids. Step two, start a neighborhood virtues class, something a lot of Bahá'ís and their friends were doing but that hadn’t yet happened in this community. Such a class would give me some real experience teaching and dealing with children, plural. Step three, morph the children’s class into a theatre group.

And that is what happened. Not exactly in the easy three-step path I had envisioned, but “close enough for government work,” as the old adage goes. A couple years and a couple virtues classes later, when the time seemed right to re-visit my original goal, my daughter (and former performance partner) agreed to join me. We started by contacting the founder of the aforementioned New York City Children’s Theatre Company. She was generous with her knowledge and willing to help. Through many long phone conversations (hooray for cell phones) we learned that the NYC project was much different, much better, and much more profound and complex than we had ever imagined.

If we followed their model, we would offer Saturday afternoon sessions that coordinated a virtues class with acting, music and dance classes which also served as rehearsals for a couple of relevant end-of-term productions. Sounded good. We could do that, right? Sure. No problem.

We decided to call our group Soul Miners, inspired by a quotation from Bahá'u'lláh -- "Regard man as a mine rich in gems of inestimable value. Education can, alone, cause it to reveal its treasures, and enable mankind to benefit therefrom" – which succinctly describes the educational philosophy, spiritual focus and social purpose that is the basis for the project. We had a name, we were off and running. Well, maybe not exactly running.

More like lurching forward in tentative baby steps and almost stalling out completely two months ago because we both felt overwhelmed by the tasks at hand. We eventually figured out that we had to reduce the plans for our first effort to manageable proportions before we could move on. One small group of students, one production. That hurdle scaled, we set a date and raced out of the starting gate.

The next few weeks became a dizzying dance of find-virtues-class-teachers-recruit-students- plan-curriculum-make-decisions-hire-theatre-arts-teachers-select-show-material-make-more-decisions-set-up-an-administrative-system-get materials-make-still-more-decisions-etc.-etc.-etc. And now, today, the planning phase is about to give way to the execution phase. Because this is it, the day of our first “building character through the arts” session. In just about 4 hours.

Yikes!

We have students and parents (some we know already, some we will meet today for the first time) who have committed to be actively involved in the endeavor. It’s a small group and we will be producing a small production. But it’s a beginning. Another beginning in a string of beginnings that came from that little whatever-it-was whispering a very definite NO, thus steering me toward a new and unexpected YES!

Time to get dressed, get crackin’, lots to do yet today before we open the doors. More later.

Sunday, February 21

DONE!

It happened. It really did! Students came, teachers taught, parents met, papers proliferated, snacks were eaten, songs were sung, prayers were prayed. A dream came true. A goal was met. End of planning, beginning of doing.

I’m sorry I can’t provide more specific description, especially to all of you who have supported this effort month after month with your prayers and your encouragement and kept hearing “soon, we’ll be starting soon” every time you asked until you probably thought “soon” was a synonym for “do what???” I’d like to vividly describe yesterday’s inaugural session but the details are too close for objective narrative, and the eventual result is too far away for subjective speculation. So all I can safely and honestly do today is express how grateful I feel that Day One actually happened. And that now we really are off and running.

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Surprise! (No, thanks.)

2010-02-15T05:29:00.000-08:00

The guy on the phone spoke in the condescending and threatening tone that is typical of professional debt collectors. I should know, I’ve certainly heard from enough of them. Not lately, though. The last time was many, many years ago, before I discovered Debtors Anonymous.

That happened in August 1992, at a time when my life truly had become unmanageable, as DA’s Step One says, and I was totally ready to “admit that [I was] powerless over debt” – or really, to be more specific, over a lifestyle based on debt. I didn’t know how it had happened or how to stop it, I only knew that somehow, despite a modest but adequate income, I couldn’t seem to pay bills on time or in some cases pay them at all, and every week I ran out of money before payday. Virtually every Wednesday evening I wrote a check for cash at the grocery store, then raced to the bank at noon on Friday to deposit my paycheck in time to cover the Wednesday deduction. If my boss was a little late handing out paychecks, or for any reason I couldn’t get to the bank on time, I had another bounced check and more charges to add to my debt load.

Not a fun way to live.

Thanks to Debtors Anonymous, I don’t live that way now. I pay bills on time or early, have an emergency fund, keep a detailed record of all expenditures, always follow a current spending plan, and never, ever get calls from collection agencies.

Which is the reason my first reaction to the unexpected call a few weeks ago was complete bewilderment. Second reaction was a faint sense that the amount he claimed I owed -- $95.00 – sounded a tiny bit familiar. Third reaction? Explosive, defensive anger: my pre-DA mode of dealing with collectors. It just popped right in, as if all the intervening years and healing experiences had never happened.

Especially when he kept insisting that I had been receiving and ignoring collection notices. Either he was crazy or I was. That was my view. His view was that I was blatently lying. THAT really made me mad! My days as a habitual financial liar were long gone. How dare he not know that!

I calmed down long enough to get the name of the oral surgeon’s office where the debt originated and a few minutes later learned that yes, I did owe $95 after insurance, and yes, they had been sending me notices, but I hadn’t been getting them due to an address error. $95 had a vaguely familiar sound because several months earlier I had seen it on a statement and asked the oral surgeon’s office about it. The clerk said they were waiting for an additional insurance payment and that when they received it, if I owed anything they would send me a final bill. No bill ever came. No closing accounting with payment due clearly listed. No pink or blue or yellow demands for money. No notices that the bill had been turned over to a collection agency. Nothing. Until the dreaded phone call.

The next day I mailed a $95.00 check directly to the doctor’s office. A week later I called to confirm they had properly recorded the payment and cancelled the collection agency, and that was the end of that. Except I really wanted to call that smarmy man back and make sure he knew that I hadn’t been lying about not receiving the bills. I wanted to, but didn’t, because he wouldn’t have believed me anyway. And I would have become defensively angry with him again. Not a good feeling.

The part of the whole experience that stays with me is how quickly my emotions snapped back into pre-DA mode. Because the source of my anger was mainly guilt. Despite the fact that I had never received those statements and hadn’t even been aware the debt existed, even though it had been more than a decade since the last time anyone had called me about an overdue bill, and no matter that I knew I could just simply pay the $95 that very day … regardless of all that, here came the guilt. Just a couple minutes of it, but enough to be unsettling.

Which greatly increases my delight at knowing that maybe as early as next month I’ll be debt-free for the first time in roughly 40 years. The only debt I have now, other than a secured mortgage, is a home equity loan from the credit union. It’s secured, too, but it feels like an unsecured debt, and it still demands a chunk of money every month. I’ve been paying ahead on it whenever possible and there’s not much left, so between my state and federal tax refunds (which are already in my bank account) and a three-paycheck month (if you have ever been paid every other week, you know what that means), and barring any unexpected major expense (are you listening, car?) it looks like the loan might be completely paid by March 31. If not that soon, within the next couple months. And then when I make my spending plans not one penny will have to be allocated to the past.

That is a great lesson I learned from Debtors Anonymous: how to live in the present instead of the past. In DA vocabulary debting means having to focus energy and dollars on paying for items bought in the past, or for former services rendered, or for financial assistance rendered at an earlier time. Consistent compulsive debting means always looking backward. Recovery in DA meant learning how to look forward, to trust that plans made could actually happen, to pay ordinary living expenses as they occur and have actual discretionary money left over ….

And to never again be afraid to answer the phone.

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Long run, short blog

2010-02-07T21:18:00.000-08:00

90 days. That’s what the email said, 90 days. And since that email had been sitting unopened in my inbox for a while, by this morning it was more like 85 days. 85 days until May 1, the second Illinois marathon.

I ran my first and so far only half-marathon last year when Champaign hosted its inaugural marathon event. Before that 10K (6.2 miles) was the longest I’d ever managed, and that was many years ago.

Unlike ice skating, I didn’t start jogging accidentally. It was a conscious decision, a strategy to help me quit smoking by replacing a harmful addiction with a healthier one. My idea was that I needed to develop a routine that would be threatened by a return to cigarettes. Fortunately I discovered that jogging in 5K and 10K runs was fun, even at my slower-than-a-turtle speed.

If six miles is a hoot, 13.1 miles would be euphoria, right? Close, actually. Finishing that half-marathon course last Spring provided an amazing sense of accomplishment, one I definitely wanted to repeat. It’s easy to get out of the habit of regular jogging though, so I registered for the May event in October. I figured that making an early commitment would ensure that I would keep running all through the winter. The weather hasn’t been very cooperative, however. Too messy too often. Too many unexpected ice patches and inconvenient snow mounds.

So instead of jogging I have been doing interval training on the treadmill, which is supposed to be a good way to pick up speed. Interval training means alternating a couple minutes of slow walking with a couple minutes of sprinting at one’s highest possible speed. I can keep going like that for 30 minutes, max. Since it takes me a whole lot longer than 30 minutes to run 13.1 miles, that kind of training is not going to be enough. Hence my determination tonight to head for the indoor running track.

My goal was six miles. I was only able to manage four. Pretty good, actually, considering how boring it is to run round and round the same track like a mouse in a maze, and also considering that I was jogging at the end of the day instead of the beginning. My body strongly prefers to exercise in the morning, as early as possible. I know that, and usually don’t even try to run or work out at night. That email about the marathon inspired a brief temporary insanity, however, which is why I was at the gym this evening instead of sitting at my computer. And why I didn’t finally begin to write until 9:00 p.m., have only been able to manage a short and very boring blog, and am now going to sign off and go to bed.

My apologies to all. And a promise of better reading next wee …zzzz….zzzz….zzzz…..

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Helen and Helena

2010-01-30T20:19:00.000-08:00

I just finished reading Julie and Julia, the book that was the basis for the movie of the same name, and have something embarrassingly awful to admit. I’m jealous!

Here this Julie Powell person comes up with this cooking-her-way-through-Julia-Child idea and suddenly she’s a full-time writer. So I figured there’s only one thing to do. Imitate!

Thus, the title of today’s blog. Except I haven’t found a Helena that I can emulate. There’s Helena Rubenstein, a famous name in cosmetics, but being a lipstick-only lady I have absolutely no interest in spending a year, or even a week, trying out all her different eye shadows and foundation creams.

There’s Saint Helena, also known as Helena of Constantinople, who died about 1600 years ago. According to you-know-what informational website, she “was the consort of Emperor Constantius, and the mother of Emperor Constantine I. She is traditionally credited with finding the relics of the True Cross.” Admirable, but definitely not accomplishments I can repeat. Or even understand very well, starting life as I did in the bosom of an eastern European Jewish family.

There’s Helena, Montana, which happens to be the capital of that state. I know this for a fact because when my seventh grade teacher called out “Montana” and I didn’t immediately raise my hand with the answer, she made a very big point of staring at me and emphatically pronouncing my name to make sure I’d get it. I got it. And I’ll never forget it.

And it’s absolutely certain that I could never love cooking the way both Julie and Julia do, or in Julia’s case, did. Nor would I ever willingly work my way through 524 recipes. The culinary highlights of my life make a pretty short list. And since you all know how much I love lists, here it is.

Liver. Yep, you read that correctly. Liver. In my pre-vegan days I adored the stuff. All kinds. Calves liver, chicken liver, chopped liver. Cold liver sandwiches for lunch. (Truth!) I cooked calves liver the way my mother did, dipped in egg, breaded and fried, and now and then daring people have told me that was the only liver they ever enjoyed eating. Not a lot of people Some people. One or two. Maybe only one.

Blintzes. That’s another recipe I learned from my mother. If you don’t know what a blintz is, think crepe and you’ll be close. I used to love watching Mom make blintzes, it was such a major production. First she would cover our big dining room table with a white tablecloth, then she’d mix up a bowl of egg batter and a batch of dry cottage cheese mixture. Next step was heating a small iron skillet – actually, I think she had a couple of them going at the same time – and pouring in some of the egg mixture, then pouring most of it back into the bowl, leaving a very thin skin to quickly solidify. She would dump each circle of cooked egg crepe on the table and head back to the stove for more until the whole table was covered with rows of yellow circles about, oh, I guess about 3 or 4 inches around.

Using an ice cream scoop Mom would plop a mound of the cottage cheese stuff into the middle of each little pancake, and when that step was completed, she would fold each pancake to make a sort of cheese-mixture-filled envelope. And finally most of the blintzes would get piled on a plate and put into the refrigerator for frying at a later time. By now I was visibly panting and salivating, because the wonderful conclusion of this whole project was getting to eat a few of the blintzes that she fried right away

When I tried duplicating this process, some 20 years later, a lot of my egg pancakes were too thin and tore when I tried to fold them, and others were the right consistency but my folding skills were sadly lacking, so I ended up with a bunch of mostly odd shaped and falling apart blintzes. And some of them completely disintegrated during the frying stage. Didn’t matter, though. They tasted just fine.

Mac & Cheese and canned spaghetti. Yep, you read that correctly, too. I used to think that one of the best dinners in the whole world was to make a batch of Kraft macaroni and cheese and combine it with the contents of a can of spaghetti and heat up the whole mess together. And when I say “used to” I don’t mean “used to” as in “when I was a kid.” I’m talking sophisticated grown-up cuisine here.

Banana bread. There was a period of a few years when I was kind of into baking, and one of the two or three items that I made back then was banana bread. I used a recipe that was in the Settlement House Cookbook, the resource my mother had relied on for everything. An easy recipe, except it called for a half-cup of buttermilk. I hated buttermilk, and neither my husband nor daughter seemed to ever want the stuff, either, so it wasn’t something we usually had on hand, whereas all the other ingredients called for were items I kept in stock. One day when I was lamenting to a friend about having to run out for buttermilk whenever one of these baking fits came over me, she told me that I could substitute a solution of half milk and half vinegar. I tried it and sure ‘nuff, it worked. Until the day I decided to double the recipe and make two loaves. In my mathematically deficient brain, I figured out that creating a cup of faux buttermilk required a whole cup EACH of milk and vinegar. Those were strange tasting loaves of banana bread, as you can well imagine.

Vegan chili. So with this kind of illustrious history as a cook, it really tickles my tootsies to have such great success with my chili. Especially since calling it a recipe, or even characterizing what I do as cooking, is really a stretch. I’ve been making the stuff for years, and all it amounts to is opening a bunch of cans and emptying them into a crock pot. Really. Not exaggerating. I put in canned chili beans, canned tomato sauce, and canned diced tomatoes. Swish some water around in the cans after they are empty and pour that into the pot. Add onions. In the old days, before it became vegan chili, I used to add cooked ground turkey. Now I use textured vegetable protein, which ends up looking somewhat like ground meat. Beans and sauce and tomatoes and onions and TVP cook on low in the crock pot for eight to ten hours and voila, chili. Very popular chili that almost always gets completely devoured at potluck dinners, even though I’m often the only vegetarian in attendance, and almost certainly the only vegan. I figure crock pot slow cooking is the secret ingredient.

However, since it isn’t likely I can find a way to turn completely un-gourmet chili into a path to fame and fortune, looks like I’ll just have to be satisfied with being just plain Helen and skip the search for Helena.

Or maybe, if I moved to Montana ….

-30-

Private corners

2010-01-24T18:46:00.000-08:00

It’s so much fun reading my daughter’s blogs. She challenged herself to write 30 blogs in 30 days, so there’s a continual flow of yummy stuff to read. And it amazes me how differently we remember things. Not just the experiences of her childhood. Everything.

Throughout her adult life we have spent a lot of time together. Rooming together, working in the same restaurant, performing together professionally, hanging out with card playing friends at coffee houses, sharing an eye-opening series of candid discussions about race unity, serving together as elected members of a Bahá'í spiritual assembly, starting various joint projects and ventures. Sometimes happy with each other, sometimes not.

Yet although so many of her blogs are about times and places and events in her life that are also my times and places and events, her memories of them are very different than mine. More proof that we – all human beings -- each live in our own private universe. I think my daughter and I should put a book together, or rather separately together. List a bunch of our shared experiences, then each go off to our own corners and write about them.

Wait a minute, why does that idea sound familiar? Riiiiiight, we’re already doing that. It’s called blogging!

Now, this minute, we are preparing to launch our most ambitious project yet. It’s a children’s theatre company associated with a New York City group of the same name. We’re calling our local chapter Soul Miners, based on a statement made by Bahá'u'lláh: “Regard man as a mine rich in gems of inestimable value. Education can, alone, cause it to reveal its treasures, and enable mankind to benefit therefrom.”

Probably the easiest way to describe this activity is to borrow a phrase from the New York City company and say that our goal is to build character on stage. Following their highly successful model, we will be providing Saturday afternoon theatre arts schools built on a foundation of spiritual education. Or moral education. Or virtues education. However it’s described, the core lessons for the six-to-ten-year-old students will be to know that they were created noble by a loving God, to understand that their highest calling is service and contributing to mankind’s well-being, and to appreciate the essential unity of message in all the great world religions.

And we’ll be aiming for as much diversity as possible in this and subsequent classes – racial diversity, religious, economic, whatever – which will provide great casts for the production of original musicals from the New York group’s award-winning repertoire.

We almost didn’t get started at all. The sheer volume of “how to” information that our New York mentor gave us, and the size and scope and complexity of that 10-year-old project, temporarily paralyzed us into frightened inaction. I might have stayed paralyzed forever, but my daughter, who’s better than me at cutting to the core of things, declared that we would have to just begin very small, very simply, and let the mission develop and grow over time. With that decision made, we were finally able to set a firm starting date and take action to recruit students, teachers, and volunteers.

In another situation I recently heard someone say, “ We are building the ship as we cross the ocean.” I immediately thought of Soul Miners. Yes! I said to myself. That’s exactly what we are doing.

What an exciting journey this will be. What magnificent gems we will help to mine. What wonderful stories we will share. And someday when we talk or write about this experience, no doubt we will each relate a very different version of what happened.

And we’ll both be right.

-30-

A messenger of joy

2010-01-18T14:49:00.000-08:00

“I have made death a messenger of joy to thee. Wherefore dost thou grieve?”

These words of Bahá'u'lláh have been a challenge and a mystery to me for over 40 years, since I first learned committed myself to the Bahá'í Faith. There was no joy in death as it was understood in my childhood home and early religious education. Death was a punishment, or an injustice, or just simply an end. Judaism, as I was taught it, did not include a view of life continuing beyond earthly bounds.

And I was just plain scared of death. Felt trapped, unfairly given a life that was destined to be snatched away and completely erased, more completely than the pencil marks in my sketches when I rubbed out wayward lines to replace them with more exacting ones. Those lines at least left a faint trace of themselves on the paper. My life would simply disappear, as if it had never happened.

But my contact with the Bahá'í Faith gave me a new understanding of death as a transition from the training wheels phase of life to a continuing, progressing, eternal existence. Eternal. That was the sticking point. My dread, my outright panic at times, transferred itself from fear of endings to fear of forever.

And I still felt trapped, by a fate over which I had no control, no choice.

But I believe that Bahá'u'lláh’s words are true, that they are directly channeled to us by a loving Creator, so my challenge was rely on prayer and meditation to accept death as a “messenger of joy,” and actually become joyful about it.

It’s been a long journey. I’m much farther along the way. There have been moments when I have felt almost there, and the peacefulness of those moments call for more.

It’s not surprising that my period of greatest serenity about death came during the time, starting three years ago this month, that I was dealing with cancer diagnosis and treatment, and with the uncertainty of outcome. Most people tried to be helpful by talking about cancer as if it were a sports event. I was counseled to beat it, fight it, was assured that I would win, with winning was defined as staying alive.

Did that mean that if I died, if the cancer “won,” I would “lose”? Did it mean that death was synonymous with defeat? Such a view didn’t gibe well with the image of death as “a messenger of joy.”

I thought a lot about the fact that death is not an “if”, it’s a “when.” I will die, someday, that was a given. Did it matter that much whether it was now or later? Logically I couldn’t see that it did.

So I could not then and cannot now accept the idea that if I, or anyone, dies from cancer or any other disease, they have lost a battle. Serenity during that time of living in cancer-world came from accepting that, while of course I would do whatever was necessary to get healthy and stay healthy, any result, any outcome, would be OK. More than OK. It would be a positive good.

It’s been a greater challenge to hang on to that serenity about death since I’ve been able to get off the sofa and have an active life again. But in a few days I have an appointment with my oncologist, a routine three-month check-up, and every time one of these appointments nears, I wonder if this will be the one where I learn the cancer has returned. And every time I have to remember the lessons cancer has taught me.

This week, with my upcoming appointment plus all the news about the devastation in Haiti and the trial initiated against the seven Bahá'ís in Iran who are accused of non-sensical and vague capital crimes, I am more aware than ever that death is inevitable, and that it will come on its own schedule, with or without warning.

And that my job – everyone’s job, regardless of their specific beliefs about death – is to be ready for it at every moment of life. Not in a morbid way. Just accepting it. And accepting the “when” of it. Because, as the well-known Alcoholics Anonymous prayer tells us, serenity comes from knowing what we can control and what we cannot control, and from putting our energies into the former rather than the latter.

It seems to me that in today’s world, the manner and timing of our deaths are more and more out of our control. I hear the rumblings of what is coming as the world collapses in upon itself, as the spiritually bankrupt structure of society as a whole implodes from lack of solid support.

It’s not the earthquake that is the disaster in Haiti, it’s the racism and materialism that created a poverty which failed to provide buildings that could stand during an earthquake.

It wasn’t Hurricane Katrina that washed out New Orleans, it was the racism and materialism that created its poor capacity to withstand a major hurricane.

And far too many people die not from disease but from the treatment of disease, treatments and drugs and procedures that often exist to serve stockholders as much, sometimes more, than patients.

Everywhere in the world I see disunity and injustice stemming from racism and materialism, from a lack of real and active faith in God, a lack demonstrated by the self-serving practices of business and government and in the everyday lives of everyday people. I see how we have created a modern Tower of Babel: too high, too weak, too poorly constructed and managed to stand

Bahá'u'lláh talked about the twin processes of destruction and construction that would lead us to a world based on justice and love. Many of us will be caught, often without warning, in the first process, even many individuals who are committed to groups and projects and goals that serve the second.

Since I don’t know what will happen to me or my family, to my friends, to my community; since my limited vision can’t see whether specific events are “good” or “bad” in the overall scheme, both personal and universal; since the only things I can control are my actions and my attitude, I choose joy. Acceptance. Serenity.

And hopefully, whenever it comes, death.

-30-

Health food homicide

2010-01-10T21:02:00.000-08:00

One by one they have all gone and now she is alone. The phones don’t ring. No footsteps can be heard in the hallway. Nary a door opens or closes in nearby offices.

The world inside feels as muffled and quiet as the world outside, where several inches of snow are threatening to shut down the city. As the only staff member who took the bus and didn’t have to worry about driving safely home, she has stayed, unconcerned as she answers emails and processes documents. Ho hum, snow again, what’s everyone so excited about? This is winter in Illinois. This is what happens here.

Then she remembers.

She had planned to go to the health food store that evening. She needs to buy kale. And not just any kale. Organic kale. She has tried the other stuff and found it limp and short-lived compared to the locally grown fluffy green bunches that particular store offers. And she absolutely must make sure she never runs out because kale is the secret ingredient in her morning nutrition shakes. Kale is Supervegetable. One sip of that amazing concoction and she can leap tall buildings at a single bound.

But she has only enough kale in her refrigerator for one more shake.

One. Just one. If the weather worsens as much the next day as forecasters are predicting, she might not be able to get to the store to get new kale. The store might even be closed. She shudders to think such a horrible thought.

But wait. There’s more! What if the store is not open tonight? Everything else is closing early, according to the radio, so why not the little store. Gasp! Horrors! What to do?

OK, she tells herself. Don’t panic. Let’s get the facts, then you can panic. And sure enough, when she calls the store she learns it is going to close at 6:00 p.m.

Time to panic!

By the time she leaves work at 5:00 and trundles to a bus stop and waits for a bus and is slowly chauffeured home and shovels enough snow to make a path to get her car out of the driveway … by then it will almost certain be too late.

Too late to replenish her kale supply. Too late to insure that she will have what she needs to make those miraculous morning shakes throughout a possibly shut-in weekend.

Too late! More gasp! More horrors! What oh what to do?

Maybe she could take a bus straight to the store and another bus home from there, just skip the shoveling-snow-to-move-the-car situation altogether. Great idea! Except to take the bus that goes by the store, first she would have to connect with it at the main transit point, and the bus schedule tells her that bus #2 is scheduled to leave that point just minutes before bus #1 is scheduled to arrive. Not such a great idea.

Suddenly the light bulb above her head bursts into brightness with the obvious solution: leave work early. It’s about 20 minutes till 5:00. If she goes now, she’ll have a fighting chance of getting an earlier bus and arriving home with enough time to rescue her car and make it to the store before 6:00.

Off with the computer. On with boots and coat and hat and scarf. Grab book and lunch bag and purse. Turn off all the lights. Lock the doors. Hurry hurry hurry.

It’s hard to hurry, though, when inconvenient mounds of thick snow are piled all over sidewalks and crosswalks, and the parking lot that is the shortest path to the bus stop is an icy obstacle course. But as luck would have it -- and luck does have it sometimes – here is her bus pulling up to the corner just as she arrives. Blessed bus, wonderful bus, opening its welcoming doors to allow her to clamber in.

Huddled in a seat in the dark as the bus rumbles cautiously down the street, she silently urges the driver to do whatever is necessary to keep this vehicle moving with all possible speed – or rather, in this weather, with the least possible delay.

There isn’t a moment to lose.

Ah, at last, she sees her corner. She pulls the cord, the bus slows down, she stumbles to the door, it opens, she’s outa there. Slogging through the white stuff to reach her door. Home at last. Fumble for the key, miss the keyhole in her haste, finally get the door open, drop the book and lunch bag, grab the shovel, push her way to the car, struggle to get that door open, start the car, commence to shoveling.

Shovel.

Shovel.

Shovel.

The minutes tick by as she labors to dislodge heaps of snow from behind the car and create enough path to give her a fighting chance of backing out to the street without getting stuck. Finally she’s done about as much as she can manage, shoveling not being one of her better skills, and she heads back to the car, ready to roll.

Except the car is covered trunk to hood with snow.

Somewhere inside this automobile there is a watchamacallit, she just bought it a couple days ago, it must be here. Yesssss! Here it is, hiding under the passenger seat. Frantically she brushes off the windshield, the side windows, the back window. Finally she’s in the driver’s seat and the car is moving, ponderously grinding its way backwards to the street. She’s at the stop light. She’s only a few blocks from the store. She’s in the parking lot with minutes to spare. She’s racing down the aisle to the produce section, where she sees one lone bunch of kale sitting in its bed of ice water. She reaches for it --

And a hand swoops down and grabs it, leaving her own hand dangling over the now empty bin.

She stares in shocked disbelief at a tall man striding away, pushing his cart in front of him, her kale inside it. This just can’t be happening. There must be more kale here, hidden away in the dark recesses of the store where customers never go. She rushes to the checkout counter and pleads with the clerk to go back there and look. He goes. She waits.

And waits.

And waits.

This is taking so long, is it a good sign or a bad one? Finally she goes back to the produce section to see if the clerk has come out into the light. After a couple minutes, he finally reappears with a cart full of boxes. “Sorry it took so long,” he says, this customer wanted a couple things, too.

“This customer” is the same man who has stolen her kale right from under her nose.

But no matter, there’s more where that came from. Two more bunches, which the clerk is placing on the shelf. But as she reaches down immediately to take them, they disappear right before her eyes. That man has done it again. He has beat her to the punch. He has stolen HER kale.

How can the clerk let this happen? Why doesn’t he do something? But he is walking to a different part of the store to place the contents of other boxes in other places. Obviously he is not interested in seeing that justice is done.

Meanwhile, back at the produce section, that man, that despicable kale thief, is examining a box of avocados, pretending to be totally oblivious to her distress. But he can’t hide the tiniest of smirks. He knows what he’s done. And he doesn’t care.

He does not deserve kale. Kale is too good for the likes of this monster. He is evil personified.

She is stunned, shocked, incapable of rational thought. She has only one idea in her mind. Get that kale. Any way. Any how. Just get it.

She grabs the spiked sign that reads “Organic kale, $2.79,” jumps between the man and the avocados and plunges the sign into her nemesis’ heart. She laughs maniacally as he falls to the floor in a pool of blood, clutching his chest, wheezing, staring unbelieving at her while she reaches into his cart and takes all three bunches of kale, then runs victoriously out the door.

She is in her car, maneuvering snow-packed roads to get home and put away her prize, when she suddenly remembers that she never paid for her groceries. The car clock says it is 6:02, too late to go back. She will have to pay next time she goes to the store.

After all, she’s not a criminal. She just needs her kale.

(Except for the homicide and a few other minor details, this is a true story. Really!)

-30-

A short note for today

2010-01-04T18:45:00.000-08:00

Apparently not having a schedule for almost two weeks detracted from my energy level rather than enhancing it. I spent more time doing basically nothing than I thought possible, because the urgency wasn't there. There was always tomorrow.

Until yesterday. I woke up Sunday knowing that the next day I'd be back at work. And voila, my energy came back, full force. A big task related to the incipient children's theatre company suddenly seemed doable, so I actually sat down and did it. Immediately!

The 11-day work break had its moments. I watched “Julie and Julia” twice and spent two delightful days with my older grandson, including sleepovers in my home, and another two days moving furniture and hiding (along with the cats) from the dust and noise of sanding. The payoff to that is that we now have a beautiful, smooth hardwood floor in the living room. It still needs staining and sealing, but since that will require us to leave for a few days, it's a project for a later time.

And I skated a lot, doggedly practicing, or rather attempting to execute, a couple of basic and necessary maneuvers that are the prelude to regaining the jump-spin level of the sport. (Small jumps, slow spins!) I even took grandson and his cousin to the rink. But that wasn't the best thing that happened that day. Devyn gave me permission to tell you the story.

Seems he had found a ring in a box in his house, but no one in his family knew where it came from or claimed it. It was a small ladies ring with diamond and pearl setting, and probably had been left in a box they used for moving in. Devyn urgently wanted to know if the ring was real gold, so I agreed to help him get an assessment.

Before going to the rink, we went to a nearby mall that has a jewelry store. The proprietor was a kindly woman who examined the ring and said it was gold mixed with metal, the diamonds were fake, the pearl was real but a very low grade. She said a jeweler could only buy it to extract the gold, and based on current gold prices and the amount that was in the ring, it would be worth $20.

We left and started walking toward the mall exit while Devyn pondered this information, but then he saw something -- actually, someone -- that halted his steps. "I want to sell it right now," he told me. So back we went to the jeweler, who exchanged the ring for two $10 bills. I'm going to give $10 to the man who walks around here all the time, he explained to the lady.

We both knew who Devyn meant: a bushy bearded, gray haired man known as Bill, who can be seen at that mall every day, winter and summer. I've never seen him beg. And this is important, because we are Bahá'ís, and Bahá'u'lláh very explicitly forbade both begging and giving to beggars. He also said "O ye rich ones on earth! The poor in your midst are My trust; guard ye My trust, and be not intent only on your own ease."

I don't know Bill's situation, whether he really is poor and homeless, but it didn't matter. Supporting Devyn's generous spirit was the higher priority. So I stood quietly by and watched as he walked up to the man and handed over one of the $10 bills, for which he received a gracious and grateful response.

And that left Devyn $10 to add to his savings for something called a Gameboy Advanced, which he was happily able to purchase that evening.

For me that moment in the mall was the best part of my grandson's visit. And as my daughter noted in her own recent blog, being a grandma is a high priority in my life. All of my grandparents died before I was born and I had missed having them in my life, so being a grandparent myself seemed a very important goal. Not one I could reach on my own, of course. It required my daughter's cooperation. And she can tell you what a pest I was about that before she met and married her husband at what I thought was close to a dangerously advanced age for my own chances of attaining grandparenthood.

But that's another story.

-30-

Listmakers Anonymous, here I come!

2009-12-28T08:36:00.000-08:00

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-

My Christmas Tree

2009-12-20T22:52:00.001-08:00

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.

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Blow out the candles

2009-12-13T23:47:00.000-08:00

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!

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Pome for a day

2009-12-06T18:31:00.000-08:00

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.

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If it's all the same to you ...

2009-11-29T19:25:00.000-08:00

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!

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Pizza tales

2009-11-22T19:56:00.000-08:00

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.

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Cranksgiving and other bits of tid

2009-11-15T18:23:00.000-08:00

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-

Wham!

2009-11-08T19:31:00.000-08:00

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-

Job Talk

2009-11-01T08:10:00.000-08:00

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-

Logic on Ice

2009-10-25T19:10:00.000-07:00

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!

Turn out my what???

2009-10-20T04:55:00.000-07:00

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 -

The Accidental Athlete, Part 2

2009-10-12T05:50:00.000-07:00

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.)

The Accidental Athlete

2009-10-05T20:50:00.000-07:00

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-

Staying connected

2009-09-27T21:46:00.000-07:00

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-

Crash!

2009-09-20T16:41:00.000-07:00

What is your activity threshold?

Now you’re probably asking me, what exactly do I mean by activity threshold? OK, maybe I should make it sound a little more scientific, something like Maximal Level of Active Involvement in Voluntary Commitments? (See what I’ve learned from all the doctoral dissertation titles I see in my job!)

MLAIVC = how much can you stuff into your life before you crash?

I can handle quite a lot so long as there are spaces for physical rest, mental recess, and ordinary tasks such as laundry and grocery shopping. Which means that in any given string of evenings or weekend days I need one or two that are free and clear, with no commitment to anyone for anything.

Years ago, for example, I learned that having two jobs, if one of them is full-time, just doesn’t work for me. I manage for while – a couple of months maybe – and then the part-time job has to go. Unfortunately there have been a couple times where it went pretty much immediately, no two weeks’ or even two days’ notice. Unhappy bosses. Uncomfortable conscience. Not a good feeling.

And there have also been times when I simply overcommitted myself to this task force and that project and such-and-such volunteer service until those spaces mentioned above just plain disappeared. And meeting all my promises became a matter of dogged perseverance with a lot of moaning and groaning and sighing thrown in.

About that time the Human Spousal Activity Barometer, better known as my husband, would say, “You’ve done it again!” Like I really needed him to tell me what I already knew.

OK, maybe I didn’t always know. But I’ve learned. Over time, I’ve become much better at respecting my threshold and avoiding over-commitment. A couple years ago, when my cancer was discovered, I experienced something relatively new. It’s called Doing Nothing. Or at least, nothing extra. For the six months from diagnosis, through surgery, and until completion of chemo and radiation, my whole focus was on just existing. No committee meetings. No volunteering. No big or little projects, personal or otherwise. At some point during that time I was able to once again attend meetings of the Urbana Spiritual Assembly and somewhat resume my duties as secretary, but that was pretty much it.

Basically my calendar was: get up, go to work, go to the cancer center, go home, go to the sofa, stay there until bedtime. Pretty strenuous, huh? Actually, yes, it was!

So when the treatment period ended and my energy level slowly started rising again, I found myself in the interesting position of having one free night after another, all week. It was kind of nice, actually. But little by little, as I felt better, I once again Became Involved. But carefully. Made sure those above-mentioned spaces were included every couple days.

It’s a matter of prioritizing, I think. You have to know – that is, I have to know, you might already have this well understood – how to distinguish what I really want or need to do from what is less important. Or, to paraphrase ‘Abdu’l-Baha, I have to be willing to put the most important ahead of the merely important. After all, sometimes everything durned idea or project or activity that pops up can seem, and actually be, important.

So I’ve been doing pretty well on the MLAIVC barometer. Until along comes a 10-day stretch when somehow almost everything I’m currently doing comes together at the same time. It started nearly two weeks ago. On every single week night and weekend day I was committed to do or help do something really important and/or necessary that just happened to be scheduled during that period: significant Bahá'í events, tasks for the children’s theatre project my daughter and I are developing, the annual new-school-year party at work, Interfaith Alliance meetings, a campus lecture I’d been waiting for two months to attend, and (as they always say in advertisements) much more! Including getting a flu shot before work one day, taking advantage of the free galley giveaway at the campus children’s book center after work another day, and lunch hours commitments such as prayers with a friend and ice skating practice and going to the Registrar’s Office to get my transcript. Plus some exercise time and some GRE study and … oh never mind, that’s about enough of that!

All good stuff. All very important. Much of it unavoidable and unchangeable to other days or other weeks. And lumped together, all too much!

So Thursday, I crashed. Actually Wednesday but the physical act of crashing had to wait until Thursday. Called in sick that morning. Spent all day on the sofa. Still felt kind of punky on Friday, like some bug was trying to get me, and went home from work early. And all the time worried that I might have to stand up a friend and miss participating in a special bike ride planned for Saturday. 42 miles through Amish countryside in the Arthur, Illinois area. Also known to our highly experienced bike club president as “Tour de Manure.”

By Saturday morning, after as much rest and sleep as possible, I felt fine. Able to get up and go by 6:45 a.m., lunch packed, bike tires properly inflated. Ready for a long, happy day.

The weather was perfect, the conversation-while-biking was interesting and fun, the wind was vigorously challenging in many spots, the scenery was beautiful, the haunted cave at Rockhome Gardens was satisfyingly scary, the other riders were friendly, the peek into Amish culture was fascinating. (Check out the picture of horses having a nice chat while they wait for their people to return.) Plus a very cool t-shirt.

All in all, a great day. And exhausting. So when it was over and I came home … you guessed it.

Crash!

-30-

Decision time

2009-09-13T17:07:00.000-07:00

How do you make important decisions?

Do you make lists, putting the benefits in one column and the costs in the other? Do you call a dozen of your closest friends to get their opinions, well-considered or otherwise? Do you flip a coin? Do you pray?

I’ve tried all of these methods at one time or another. (OK, maybe not the dozen friends, but at least two or three.) The benefit/cost list idea actually appeals to me most, since I like to think of myself as a rational, methodical thinker.

I like to think of myself that way. Unfortunately, it ain’t so. That system only works for decisive people, which group does not include me. It’s not my fault. As you might remember from a previous story, I put all the blame for my indecisive nature on the time I was born. (See the August 16 blog, if you’re curious.)

Here’s what happens when I try to use the list method. First I put fact #1 in the benefits column. Then I think, hmmm, well, of course, in such-and-such a situation or for this-or-that reason it could actually be a cost, so I move it to the other column. But on the other hand, it could be both, better put it in a third column for “not sure.” After repeating this wishy-washy shuffling of the various other facts, I end up going back to fact #1 (and 2 and 3, etc.) and putting them back in their original column, thus spending most of my decision-making time on this completely unproductive process and just about zilch on actually making a decision. Which is really OK, because I probably wouldn’t be able to stick to a decision if I did make one!

Consulting friends works out a little better – after all, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá told us that we should consult on all matters. (Don’t ask me where he said that, just trust me, he did. Somewhere.) And talking it over with a friend or two often helps, except what I really want my friend to do is make the decision for me and tell me what it is. And at the same time, what I really don’t want my friend to do is make the decision for me and tell me what it is, because I’d never listen anyway.

So scratch that system, at least as the main one.

As for flipping a coin … someone recently suggested a method she’d heard about, where you flip a coin and if you don’t like the answer, pick the other one. Let’s see, do you think that would work for me? Sure. Right. I’d be flipping that coin until it disintegrated.

So now we get to prayer. And very specifically to what I call the Five Steps of Decision Making and what the book calls “Dynamics of Prayer.” The particular book referenced here is “Principles of Bahá'í Administration,” and the specific passage is in the Appendix and is attributed to Shoghi Effendi, guardian of the Bahá'í Faith from 1921-1957, although it’s noted that the attribution has never been authenticated. Personally, I don’t care if it’s authentic or not. It works!

According to the text, Ruth Moffat, an early American Bahá'í, reported that Shoghi Effendi told her the first step to solving any problem is to pray and meditate. Second, “arrive at a decision and hold this” even if it seems “almost impossible of accomplishment.” You asked, you got an answer, don’t quibble, trust it!

Third, “have determination to carry the decision through” and “immediately take the next step.” Fourth, be confident that this is the correct answer and that the reason will become clear. And finally, “ACT … as though it had all been answered ... until you become an unobstructed channel for the Divine Power to flow through you.”

In the 40-plus years since I became a Baha’i, I’ve followed this guidance several times, and have always found it to be effective. Sometimes I’ve experienced a very strong sense of what I should do, and not always what I thought the answer would be. The most explicit example of that happened in October of 1969. At the time I was trying to decide whether to return to Illinois State University the next Fall to continue my undergraduate education, or to stay in the Chicago area and keep working full-time as a secretary.

I picked an evening when neither of my apartment mates were home and tried my best to buckle down and just plain pray, without distraction, and with focus on the question at hand. And I got an answer, loud and clear. Not something I heard, exactly. I don’t know how to describe the sensation. It just seemed to be there, in an almost physical sense. When I tried to deny it as not being logical, I felt like a wall had plunked itself down next to me and was not allowing me to move to any other mental position.

The answer that I felt so strongly was, yes, go back to school, but no, not next Fall. Now. Meaning in January, when the Spring term would start. It didn’t make sense because I had a lease, and to leave the Chicago area and move back downstate in January would involve either finding someone to replace me or paying my apartment mates for the remainder of the lease term. And I really didn’t want to have to deal with either option.

But I’d started this prayer process with the inherent promise to complete it, and completing it meant accepting the answer, etc., so come January I was back on campus. Now here’s the moral of the story: if I hadn’t listened to whatever or whoever was giving me instruction, I wouldn’t have married my husband less than a year later and that means our daughter would not have been born. Due to specific circumstances in his life, and the fact that I came back in January instead of the next September, the two of us became good friends and then engaged. That exact situation would not have existed in September.

Which is not to say I wouldn’t have married eventually, and maybe even to the same man, or that I wouldn’t have had other children, but not this child, this particular combination of genetic traits who has become a particular adult who does so much good for so many people that I really believe she was the reason for the answer that came that evening. Because I also believe that praying for answers, and especially in the systematic way Shoghi Effendi is purported to have explained, gives us access to information beyond what we can acquire with our brains. Someone out there knows stuff about us that we don’t know, and when we pray we open the channels for them to tell us what we need to do for reasons we don’t yet comprehend.

OK, so that was, at least to my mind, a dramatic result of using this Five Step process. However, when I used it last Monday, I didn’t get a resounding “DO THIS” kind of answer. It was more like, yup, you know what to do, don’t deny it, just go for it already. Sort of a warm, soothing sauna rather than a wake-up-or-else cold shower.

And what was I trying to decide? Whether to apply to the master’s program in creative writing. The consulting-with-friends method of decision making also played a big part in this one, because so many of you sent me such wonderful kind and supportive comments on my last blog – on the blog itself, in Facebook, and via email – that the whoever or whatever was listening to my prayer didn’t have to give me much more than a gentle nudge.

Shoghi Effendi, or rather Ruth Moffat’s memory of Shoghi Effendi, doesn’t seem to be guaranteeing that the answer that comes will necessarily be the final answer, but instead that this is the answer you need. “Have faith and confidence that … the right way will appear, the door will open, the right thought, the right message, the right principle or the right book will be given you.” So I don’t know if I’m supposed to go ahead with this application because I really might get accepted, or because applying is a necessary route to some other important place in my life, or because there’s something I need to learn from the process. All I know is I must do it, for whatever reason, and that I must do it with “the determination to carry the decision through.”

So since the book says to immediately take the next step, as soon as my prayer time ended I went straight to the computer and registered for a date to take the dreaded GRE exam.

October 19. 12:30 p.m.

Pray for me. PLEASE!

-30-

Gimme a G, gimme a R ...

2009-09-05T04:38:00.000-07:00

Sometimes it doesn’t pay to know too much.

And after eight years of coordinating student admissions for a graduate department, I certainly know a lot about the challenges and difficulties involved in applying for grad school. So the idea of doing it myself is daunting, to say the least.

But there it is, and it doesn’t seem to want to go away.

The idea is this: to get a Master’s of Fine Arts in creative writing, in the English Department of the University of Illinois, where I received a bachelor’s in the same subject two years ago. An undergrad program, by the way, that I started in 1963 and finished in 2007. 44 years, with a mere 31-year break when completing my degree program was the farthest thing from my mind.

And still was when I signed up for a Social Issues acting class in 2001, just a few weeks after starting my new job at the university. The class was free -- a lovely fringe benefit -- met right after work just a couple blocks away from my office, and was really more of a repertoire company than a standard class. No homework. No exams. Each semester the students put together productions that explored topics such as racism or sexual abuse and present performances followed by discussion in various venues around campus. It was a great class and gave me the chance to work with some very talented young actors, none of them theatre majors, and a teacher whose low key directing style is amazingly powerful in pulling all the elements of production together to create effective and high-quality performances.

I received one college credit hour for that first class, and two more when I took it again the next semester. And that got me wondering. How many other classes would I need to take to finish my degree requirements? What classes would they have to be?

Thanks to a dedicated and hard-working undergrad advisor in the English department, and an equally conscientious admissions coordinator in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, I eventually learned that it would take 10 more classes to fulfill the requirements that were in effect when I first started as a freshman.

Of course, two of those classes would have to be general education physical science – Chemistry 101 or some such impossible thing – so I put that out of my mind and started on the fun part of the list. Literature classes. Fiction and non-fiction creative writing classes. Three other acting classes for a partial theatre minor.

Enrolling in just one class per semester, with my work schedule and lunch hours adjusted since these classes all met during the day, it seemed like a very, very long journey to the end of this program. But taking classes became a routine – and very stimulating -- part of my life, and when the day came that I found that all I had left was the dreaded science requirement, time seemed to have flown by to get me to this point.

So there I was, in late August of 2006, sitting in a lecture hall, surrounded as usual by students 40-plus years younger than me --15 years younger than my daughter, for heaven’s sake! – attempting to understand the first lecture in basic astronomy. And pretty darned worried that I wouldn’t grasp a word of it.

I was right to be worried. The subject matter throughout that semester, while interesting, and apparently pretty simple for most of the other students, was light years out of my comfort zone, not to mention my actual capacities of comprehension. Studying for that class took a myriad of hours of puzzling (or just outright memorizing) my way through the textbook and lecture notes as well lots of time spent in the office of the teaching assistant, who probably should get some sort of commendation for helping me. Here was a guy who had been in love with astronomy since he was a little boy, and whose brain wrapped itself around the subject as comfortably as a cat curled up on a pillow, struggling to find new ways to demonstrate the most basic – and to him, obvious -- concepts to someone who had once taken a college aptitude test and scored in the 9-10 range in language and social studies and 1-2 in math and science.

But pass that course I did. And with a B. Can you believe it?

In order to apply to graduate school, I have to take the Graduate Record Exam, or GRE. And because of my job, I already know a lot about that. I know it’s a very tough test. I know that students usually study for months to prepare for it, and I’ll have to take it in a few weeks. I’ve seen the modest scores of applicants with near perfect undergrad GPAs, whereas my overall GPA, even with the mostly As and a couple Bs that I earned since 2001, is still in the low C range. I know that one section of the exam is quantitative, i.e., math. And you know, from the astronomy story, how well I’m likely to do on that.

Yep, I definitely know too much.

OK, let’s look at this whole subject logically. Calmly. One step at a time. Application to master’s program: GRE. GPA. Personal statement. Recommendation letters. (Yikes, what if my recent undergrad instructors don’t recommend me? Heck, what if they don’t remember me?) And to up the ante a bit more, I want to specialize in an area that the U of I program doesn’t officially offer, so I’d have to be submit a sample of performance writing rather than the more usual narrative fiction.

But on the other hand, the young woman who directs the MFA program met with me this week for almost an hour and listened to my story, my aspirations, my misgivings. We had already emailed a bit, and while she was kind enough to give me some time during her office hours, I fully expected her to conclude the discussion by telling me that the whole idea was impossible. Forget it. No way.

Instead she encouraged me to apply. Not because she thinks I’ll be accepted, she has no way to assess that yet, but because she thinks it’s possible. Or at least, not impossible.

So I’m thinking.

My daughter wants me to go for it. Apply. See what happens. What would be worse, she says, trying and not being accepted or not trying? A very unfair question, to my mind.

I have to decide quickly in order to have a chance of finding a GRE exam in my part of the world that still has some empty seats. Gads, there it is again. GRE. Scariest three letters in the alphabet at this moment.

But then, I passed astronomy, didn’t I?

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Trial by opportunity

2009-08-30T22:31:00.000-07:00

Have you ever been on jury duty? My only time happened a few years ago, and it was a very educational process. But not in the way I expected.

If I were my daughter, by the time period of jury duty ended I would have exchanged phone numbers with at least three new friends and made definite plans to get together with one or more of them in the next few days. But, being me, I simply said good-bye, see you later, nice to have met you, and left the courthouse.

Getting called to jury duty in Champaign county means putting your life in limbo for two weeks. Your letter tells you to report to the courthouse in downtown Urbana on a Monday. When you get there and join your fellow jurors that first morning, you are instructed to call in every night to a recorded message. The message tells you which individuals (identified by number) are supposed to report the next day. How many they need will depend on how many trials are expected to happen, and that can change at a moment’s notice, so you call in every night to learn whether you’ll be able to go to work or class or keep a doctor’s appointment the next day.

It makes for a sort of improv life, but you don’t live it alone. You are joined by a couple hundred fellow citizens, a random mix of men and women, old and young, Black and White and whatever, working and retired, with young children at home and grown children gone from home and grandchildren nearby or far away, most of you new to the jury experience, some of you repeating for a second or third time.

The one thing you all have in common is a willingness to serve. Anyone not willing or not able took advantage of the opportunity to report a couple of weeks earlier and explain their situation, certainly in many cases exaggerating or outright lying about them, in order to be excused from jury duty. But the people you sit with in the jury assembly room every day, waiting to learn whether you will be called to possible jury selection or sent away before noon, are all people who showed up, other commitments and responsibilities notwithstanding.

Knowing that maybe I’d be at work and maybe I wouldn’t meant that all preparations for possible absence from my job at the university had to be provisional. “Just in case I’m not here when this student returns her qualifying exam answers ...” “Just in case I’m gone when that applicant’s materials arrive ...” “Just in case anyone has a life-or-death question that only I, out of all the people in the universe, can answer ...” Fortunately, my supervisor and the rest of the staff were happy to help in any way necessary, and of course, we didn’t really expect that I actually would be gone. We were simply getting ready.

And wisely, as it turned out.

I’d been called to jury duty three other times in my life -- in three other counties, so I couldn’t realistically believe I was being singled out for harassment. However, because I’d never been selected to sit on a jury, or even, for that matter, been required to report beyond the first day, I thought the most interesting part of jury duty would be getting to serve at an actual trial. And since I ended up on three juries during that two-week service period in Champaign County, I had ample opportunity to test my theory.

In my first trial, on day two of my jury period, a man was accused of attempting to burgle three parked cars. After the jury selection was complete, all thirteen of us (including one alternate) were led by a Sheriff’s deputy into a small but pleasant room and assigned seats around a long table to wait until time for the trial to begin. Many of us immediately opened books or magazines, some began quiet conversations with neighbors. After reading my current mystery novel for about 30 minutes, I needed some other diversion, and asked a man who had a Chicago Tribune if he’d mind letting me do the crossword puzzle. He didn’t, so I did. It wasn’t a very hard one, but it had its challenges, and other people at the table became interested in watching me labor to figure out those words that didn’t come easily. Someone commented that I was doing pretty well and someone else lamented cheerfully that she never could figure out these things. The man who’d loaned me the puzzle offered suggestions, and finishing the puzzle became a group effort. That led to our solving the word jumble, and then to general chit-chat around the table.

We’d been cautioned against engaging in any discussion of the upcoming trial, so conversation was more the getting-to-know-you, filling-time variety, during which I discovered that the distinguished looking lady in her late 60’s was the mother-in-law of the man who had mid-wived my first grandson. He was the only male mid-wife in town, so a couple of other people recognized his name as well, and we all enjoyed hearing her complimentary anecdotes about him.

Our alternate, a sweet-voiced pleasant woman, entertained us with the story of her one previous jury experience, in which she had also been an alternate and had sat through the entire trial but been dismissed before the jury retired for deliberations. She never did learn the outcome.

Having watched juries operate on untold number of movies and TV shows, I was interested in trying out an idea borrowed from my almost four decades of membership in the Baha’i Faith. One of the principles of Bahá’í consultation is that first a group has to ascertain the facts, and then agree on them, before they can proceed to decision making, so I thought it would make sense to start jury deliberations by first going around the table and letting each person state his current feelings about the defendant’s guilt or innocence.

When the time came for the jury to begin deliberations, someone at the table suggested that one of the two “crossword puzzle experts” should be foreperson, and when the Tribune owner declined, that left me, surprised and a little nervous with the responsibility. Everyone agreed to try my go-around-the-circle idea, however, and we learned that we had slightly differing feelings about whether the defendant was guilty of the first count, intention to burgle, but were generally in agreement that there was little doubt he was guilty of the second count, unlawfully entering the cars without permission.

It was impressive to me to see how hard the members of the panel worked to stay fair and impartial, and to be thorough in their search for a correct verdict. This certainly wasn’t a capital case, or for that matter a particularly difficult one. The defense had not even called any witnesses, a fact we were supposed to ignore since the State had the burden of proof. There was little or no reason to doubt that the defendant had been in the cars, the eyewitness and police testimony was solid, and we could easily have spent about five minutes, max, to come up with a guilty verdict and be allowed to leave while the afternoon was still young.

Instead, we spent at least 30 minutes and made very sure that everyone’s thoughts were heard, and that we all agreed with the final decision. With that concluded, we eagerly alerted our deputy that we were ready to return to the courtroom, and just as eagerly hurried out of the courthouse after quick good-byes as soon as we were dismissed by the judge.

During six of the remaining eight days my number was included among those posted in the recorded message, and I discovered that when I arrived at the jury assembly room each morning, I was now more interested in joining fellow jurors in conversation (usually around one of the big tables) than in reading. I especially enjoyed laughing with another Helen, a quick-witted, gregarious computer programmer. Not having a very common name, we both were tickled to discover each other, especially since we were about the same age. Helens are much more likely to be from the generation born around 1920 than those of us born two or three decades later.

We didn’t all get called in on the same days, and different ones of us disappeared at various times to serve on juries. Most of us were dismissed by about 11:00 a.m. each day. But enough of us seemed to land in the jury assembly room at the same times that we began to recognize one another, and feel comfortable and familiar together. A lot of our conversation was about the trial experiences we were having, with one another or others. We evaluated the performance of different attorneys, graded the judges, and re-hashed the verdicts, thoroughly enjoying our new found legal expertise.

I can’t remember any other names, but can recall some of the personalities in these chats. There was an Egyptian engineering professor, a dignified, olive-skinned man with thick gray curls who brought fruit to munch and talked about running several miles every morning. He loved to teach and was feeling frustrated by never knowing from day to day if he would be available for his class schedule.

The retired farmer, on the other hand, a large man with big hands and rough skin, was not missing anything during his time on jury duty, and he seemed perfectly relaxed and contented during our group conversations, joking and expounding enthusiastically about subjects ranging from diabetes medications to ingredients needed to illegally manufacture meth.

A young man with short hair and a quiet, subdued manner, with whom I served on the trial of a boy accused of possessing cocaine, surprised all his fellow jurors by being the only one among us who knew anything about how cocaine users routinely carry and hide their illegal substances. His information helped us better understand the State’s case and arrive at a guilty verdict.

One morning Helen and the farmer and the young man and a few others of us decided to pass the time by playing cards with one of the decks provided in the room. We didn’t remember the rules of Hearts so we made them up as we went along, and when one of the group was called away to jury selection, another player immediately took his place in the game.

Another morning I was questioned and then excused from a jury by the defense attorney -- one I recognized from the trial of the cocaine possessor. Apparently he recognized me as well. Returning to the assembly room, I spent an enjoyable few minutes waiting for dismissal while commiserating with a man and woman I hadn’t previously met, but who also had just been excused, in their case by a prosecuting attorney. They’d been jurors for another of her cases and in that instance the defendant was found not guilty. It appeared to us that these attorneys really didn’t have much faith in the average citizen’s ability to be fair and impartial.

If that was an accurate assessment of their thinking, I was sure it was wrong, especially after my third and final jury service. It involved a battery accusation in which a woman had followed a co-worker into the bathroom, knocked her down and started kicking her. The witnesses presented by the prosecution and the almost non-existent argument made by the defense lawyer gave us little information to use in reaching a decision, yet we were, as usual, instructed not to take anything into account except the testimony we had heard.

There were so many holes in the story -- What had the alleged victim said or done prior to the incident? What had happened in previous days that built up to the battering? Was the accused provoked in ways unknown to us? -- that at first I felt uncomfortable with a guilty verdict. But when we went around the table to share our initial feelings it became clear that I was the only one at the table who had any reservations. After our first tally, I decided “guilty” made more sense and that I agreed with the majority. Yet even though it was already almost 3:00 p.m. on the last afternoon of our two-week stint and surely everyone very much wanted to go home, the sooner the better, my fellow jurors refused to let me change my vote until we had thoroughly discussed the testimony and the reasons for our different judgments. After about 45 minutes I was finally able to convince them that I really did agree with their point of view that the perpetrator’s actions made this an undoubted case of conscious and deliberate battery, no matter what the provocation, and was completely comfortable with a guilty verdict.

My fellow Helen was on that jury, and I’d enjoyed spending more time with her, but after reporting back to the courtroom, delivering our verdict and being dismissed, I simply said good-bye and hurried out, anxious to get back to work and catch up on my e-mail. It wasn’t until later that I realized I’d missed an opportunity. She would have been a good new friend to have.

If I were my daughter, by now Helen would be an old friend with whom I had many shared memories. But being me … well, let’s just say I was tried -- and found wanting.

Bookin' it!

2009-08-27T20:56:00.000-07:00

So I had really good intentions to write my next blog several days ago, then a few days ago, then yesterday. But you know what they say about the road paved with good intentions.

I have an excellent excuse, though. Had to finish a book first.

Do any of you have this malady? That you get so involved in a novel you start feeling like you live there and you can’t concentrate on anything else until you’ve read the last page. Not like my husband reads the last page, i.e., skipping to the back of the book first to see if it has a happy ending. He does that, really. I maintain that such a dastardly practice is a crime against the author, who has carefully structured the book to lead its reader through the story and reach the end in the proper way, and that the end is meaningless without the beginning and the entire middle. He ignores me.

Anyway, what I’m trying to say is that I usually get to a certain point in a novel where I just can’t stop reading. Anything else that can possibly be put on hold is set aside so I can find out what’s going to happen to these characters who have become my buddies, my family, my world.

The danger is that I can get so revved up about knowing how the book ends that I start racing through the final pages, practically skimming the text. That’s when I have to take several deep breaths, call my Plot Addicts Anonymous sponsor, and force myself to read slowly and ENJOY the story. The language. The process of reading.

Back to my good blogger intentions. I had been reading a big book, “The Hour I First Believed” by Wally Lamb, and the end was in sight, so I was compelled to devote all of last evening to it, finally trying to force my eyes to stay open so I could read one more page, then one more, until I fell asleep on the couch with the book open on my mid-section and the cat stretched out half on me and half on the book. Then today I took a morning break AND an afternoon break in order to keep reading, even changed my noon ice skating schedule in order to read during lunch, then stayed at my desk after work to finish the last few pages.

Free at last!

So really, I want to know, does anyone else get that involved in fiction? Because I don’t have this tendency just with books. Movies, too. Only there it’s manifested by an absolute hatred of anyone who dares to talk to me while I’m watching. You never ever want to invite me to hang out in your living room with several friends to catch a video. And asking me questions during the movie? Such as “Why did he do that?” or “What did that mean?” Or the absolute worst, “Do you think he’ll really do that?” Nyet. Nada. Never. Not if you value your life.

When I was in high school and “West Side Story” was released, back in the days when actually going to a theatre was the only way for ordinary folk to see a movie, I went to that one with girl from my synagogue, someone I didn’t know very well. Big mistake. Because afterwards, as we were coming out of the theatre, this practically perfect stranger had the audacity to start talking. And to expect me to answer.

I was truly ready to kill.

Because that movie had, well, moved me so much, and so completely, that I was still in it for several minutes after we left. Which is not an uncommon experience – often everything even seems to sound different right after I leave a movie theatre – but it was more true for that film than any other I had experienced. Still is.

OK, there’s always an exception to any rule, and there must have been a few “no talk” exceptions in my movie watching career. Let me think. Oh, right, here’s an example: about 25 years ago, when my husband and I watched this was so-bad-it’s-good science fiction flick on our old black and white TV. The story was about some sort of overgrown plant that was gobbling up cities, and the fun part was that it was feasting on a bunch of towns in central Illinois, towns we knew or had lived in. This monster plant didn’t want to play in Peoria, it just wanted to digest it!

And then there was … or … Drat! Come to think of it, that might be the only exception.

Anyway, having to finish that book by Wally Lamb is my excuse for not writing another blog until tonight. And after I turn off the computer, I have a new Jonathan Kellerman book waiting for me.

See you next year!

Blocked!

2009-08-16T18:47:00.000-07:00

You’ve heard of Writer’s Block? That sneaky, relentless, frustrating disease that paralyzes a writer’s brain every time he or she attempts to sit down at a keyboard and actually write something?

I seem to have caught it.

And unfortunately, it’s not a disease that would respond to any ordinary treatment, such as a pill or surgery. Although after enough time staring at a blank page, radical brain surgery seems like a very good idea. Only not to cut something out. To put something – anything – in!

The only medicine that I know for it is very unpleasant and definitely not fun, at least not at first. It doesn’t come in a bottle or have a co-pay, and it can’t ever be passively administered by a nurse or a mother or any other caregiver. Our poor blocked writer has to self-administer the nasty stuff.

Because the only cure I’ve ever found for Writer’s Block is to write. Just write. Something. Anything. Get the fingers moving. Make the keyboard tap-tap-tap. Keep going until thoughts begin to take shape and turn into coherent sentences on the screen.

Like – I hope – right about now. Because I’ve been trying to figure out what to write for a week, and have come up with at least a dozen ideas, and haven’t been able to get started writing even one. Well, no, actually I did start writing one. It went something like this:

“This week I read a book about … and it made me think about … and …”

Other than the title and the subject of the book, that was pretty much it. Scintillating stuff, huh?

So I decided today that the problem is too many ideas. Just can’t make a decision. After all, I was born with an indecisiveness curse. Really, I was. Born exactly at midnight, that is, at least according to my mother. She said the doctor and nurses argued over whether midnight ended an old day or started a new day, and of course the doctor won, picked the new day, and recorded my time of birth as 12:01 a.m. And that’s why I have a very hard time making decisions and choosing between alternatives.

It’s a good excuse, anyway.

So sure enough, true to form, no sooner had I decided that having too many blog ideas was my problem with getting down to the actual business of writing about one of them, than I changed my mind and decided something entirely different.

Namely, that I was blocked by fear. Of all of you. Or, to be more precise, of failing all of you.

Because I have received some wonderful and highly gratifying feedback on my first three blogs, and that’s really kind of scary. A kind of omigod-they-like-it-what-if-I-can’t-keep-it-up scary. A fear-of-success brand of scary. A maybe-it-would-be-safer-to-quit-while-I’m-ahead sort of scary. A why-in-heaven’s-name-did-I-start-a-blog-and-what-made-me-think-anybody-would-ever-want-to-read-it scary.

But then, I know quite a bit about all those kinds of scary. I used to go to ARTS meeting in Chicago. That’s Artists Recovering Through the Twelve Steps. Most twelve-step groups exist to help participants stop something – drinking or overspending or co-dependence, whatever – but this one existed to help people start something. Their art, whatever it might be. In our group there were not only musicians and painters and writers and dancers and actors, there were also weavers and doll makers and wood workers – anybody who needed help getting started with actually doing whatever it was they liked and needed to do.

Some of us had confidence problems because of old but still painful parental attitudes towards our art. Some of us found it hard to believe that being an artist – especially a professional of any sort – was a legitimate and worthwhile goal in a society that bestows its highest honors on whoever makes the most money. Many of us found it hard to believe that we had anything to say, in whatever form we said it, important enough for anyone else to hear or see. A few had been very successful in their particular fields and were stymied by the real or perceived pressures of that very success.

Most of us probably had a little of all that and more, to varying degrees.

Hence, today, now, this week, here I am. Writer’s Block.

But hey, look at this, I’ve written – wait, let me count – 726 words that appear to be at least marginally coherent and possibly a tiny bit interesting. So maybe I should just stop here and have confidence that next week I’ll be able to pick one of those other topics and write about it.

Which, really, will be the only option. After all, blocked or not, I can’t use this one again!

New topic, new thoughts, old questions

2009-08-03T07:00:00.000-07:00

Someone died yesterday.

A lot of someones died yesterday, but this one was someone I knew. Not someone I knew well – hardly at all, actually – but she was the daughter of my friend, a beloved of others close to me, a member of my religious community. She was very young, not yet 30.

And she chose to die.

A death that touches ones own life is always hard to handle emotionally. A friend’s or acquaintance’s suicide is hardest of all. As one friend said, you are left wondering if you could or should have done something that might have helped. Made one more phone call, offered one more prayer, written an encouraging email, listened better, insisted more, found a more effective way to counsel. Or in my case, just taken a minute to meet her and talk to her the few times over the last several years that we were in the same room.

She had a history of deep, debilitating, clinical depression, along with a painful chronic illness, and had attempted suicide before, so her family and close friends know that there is probably nothing they could have done to change her chosen destiny, and no way she could ever have what most of us consider a normal life – marriage, children, career. And for many of them, and for me, there is a strong belief – a certainty – that she is not gone at all, has simply abandoned her physical body and chosen to go on to the next part of her life now rather than later. A part of life that does not include the continual pain her body caused.

So regrets and sadness and disbelief and anger and relief and love and hope are all mixed up together in our minds and hearts as we awake to face another day in this first part of our lives, the part we live in our own bodies.

She was someone I hardly knew. But I know her mother, and was honored to be given the opportunity to listen to her in a late night phone conversation.

I know her step-father, the only one in the family who saw the body – because the police insisted that someone had to do it – and now carries that image in a special place of pain all his own.

I know her one-time baby sitter, who watched her grow up and thought of her as “my baby,” and was fortunate to be able to visit that friend in the hospital to tell her what had happened in person and sit with her while she talked out her feelings and prayed.

I know her grandmother, a woman I greatly admire for her fortitude in dealing with tests and for her loving spirit and diligent work ethic.

I know her grandfather, a man confined to a wheelchair due to his own debilitating disease which started when he was much younger, who always offers jokes and smiles to the rest of us able-bodied types who take ease of movement and independence for granted.

I know her best friend, who is pregnant with a first child, and know the friend's mother and father, whose grief for the death must be mingled with concern for their own daughter’s health during this emotional time.

I know my daughter, who called me crying to tell me the news, and later sat in my kitchen and talked with me about the thin veils, as our religious writings call them, that come between those of us who still inhabit bodies and those who don’t. And about the times when some of us see or hear or feel, however quickly, through those veils and become aware of our loved ones on the other side, and of their happiness in that world.

And I know that many of us, upon hearing of this death, and the manner of this death, will be concerned about the condition of her soul. We are Bahá'ís, and Bahá'u'lláh called death a “messenger of joy.” But what of suicide? Is that a different case?

Bahá'ís don’t have ministers, we have elected governing bodies. I’m one of the secretaries of Urbana’s Spiritual Assembly, and so in another late night phone call with the other secretary, we consulted on what we could and should be doing. And we found a statement made by ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, Bahá'u'lláh’s son and designated Interpreter, about another’s suicide. “…rest assured.” He said. “[The deceased] will be immersed in the ocean of pardon and forgiveness and will become the recipient of bounty and favor.”

Someone died yesterday.

I went to bed thinking about her death, and woke up thinking about it. And now I know what blogs are for.

- 30 -

Bloggin' right along

2009-07-28T19:17:00.000-07:00

Omigosh, I just discovered an actual comment on my blogsite. It’s pretty obvious I’m a new citizen of Blog USA since it never occurred to me until last night to check the site. A lot of friends were kind enough to respond via email, though, to my request for feedback, and it appears there is an acceptable amount of “OK, come on, what happened next?”
So, let’s go …

As we begin a new episode of “I Was a Teenaged Journalist,” we see a grumpy, cigar-toting editorial page editor stalking away from the newspaper’s morgue while our adolescent heroine looks on in confused consternation. Poor heroine!

Well, not really, because Mac’s grumpy insistence that I learn – immediately – to write directly via keyboard was a great blessing. And so was his next strategy. He got rid of me as fast as possible! He handed me off to the Wayne Allen, entertainment and Sunday editor. I’d hate to see a replay of that conversation.

Mac: I gotta gid rid of that girl, she’s about as useless as a one-legged bar stool.
Wayne: Come on, Mac, she can’t be that bad.
Mac: Oh yeah? Well you take her then.
Wayne: Me? What would I do with her?
Mac: You must have something nobody else wants to do.

And he did. Of course I don’t really know if no one else wanted to do it, but it didn’t matter because I kind of liked it. OK, truth: I liked it a lot. “It” being that I became the TV log writer. THE TV log writer, as in the only one at that newspaper. Pretty cooooool, huh?

Oh, wait, I forgot, some of you might not even know what a TV log was, in this day of pointing remote controls at TV screens to see schedules for hundreds of channels. In 1961, when there were only a handful of channels, newspapers could publish a schedule, or “log,” of all the available shows in one small section of one page once a week. And include radio offerings, too!

So my job was to watch all the upcoming TV shows and write descriptions of them for the log. WRONG! Actually, only half-wrong. I did write descriptions, but they were generally one-line distillations of the longer descriptions provided by the network. For example, “A fish salesman discovers that his partner has been embezzling the company’s funds and reports his suspicions to police, but then murders the partner in a fit of anger and leaves clues that indicate the man was killed by a creature with scales and gills” might become “Giant fish swallows man hunted by police.” OK, OK, it’s just an example!

Wayne probably didn’t want me any more than Mac, but he was a kind, soft-spoken man who was willing to give me a chance, and I continued in that job until after high school graduation. But wait, there’s more! Remember I said that Wayne was also Sunday editor? When the paper decided to add a school page to the Sunday edition, he appointed me as correspondent for my high school, and I became a columnist again. Later the news desk paid me to write a few free-lance news articles. Now that was an education! I don’t remember the subject of my first news story, but I do remember that by the time it had been edited and published I didn’t recognize it. I definitely learned news writing the old-fashioned way, i.e., the hard way. Sink or swim, so to speak. (But watch out for giant man-eating fish.)

Which was part of my problem when I took my first, and only journalism class during my first semester at University of Illinois. The instructor was teaching journalism theory and I figured I was above all that, being already a pro and all and having small but quite spendable paychecks to prove it. So I showed him. I dropped the class and at the same time dropped my plan to major in journalism. Looking back (and dragging all of you along with me) I can see that it would have been better if I’d attended a journalism trade school rather than an academic institution.

(But maybe it’s just as well that I didn’t know about such places at the time, because I don’t think journalism was a good fit for me. By the time I enrolled at U of I in September 1963, I had already learned about and become mightily attracted to the Bahá'í Faith. And the most basic, bedrock principle of that religion is Bahá'u'lláh’s teaching about unity, at every level of human interaction. And one of the Bahá'í system’s biggest safeguards of unity is the law against backbiting and gossip. AND it seems to me that about 90% of what passes for news these days is just that, backbiting and gossip. I’m sure many professional Bahá'í journalists have found ways to pursue their calling without violating their principles in this regard, however, and would love to hear how they’ve managed it.)

I expect the academic nature of my first journalism class was only part of my inability to continue toward my goal. The larger part was probably that I didn’t come from the kind of family that focused on setting and reaching goals. Well, that’s not exactly true. My father had plenty of goals, just not the kind I wanted to pursue, and his means of achieving them were problematic also. And while the prevailing image of Jewish families assumes a high level of respect for education -- you know, the old “my son, the doctor” story – that certainly wasn’t true of my immediate family.

But that’s another story.

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Getting started

2009-07-17T05:57:00.000-07:00

OK, big decision here: I’m starting a blog.

Not exactly a daring exploit, since these days it seems that everyone and his pet canary are writing blogs. I just wasn’t into it, but I’ve been challenged by my daughter to try it. Seems like a lot of things I do these days start that way, with a challenge from my daughter. Something to explore later.

Anyway, back to the blog. I don’t know why the whole phenomenon hasn’t attracted me. It should. Basically blogging is like column writing, and that’s the specific kind of newspaper work I used to do in high school and planned to do as a career when I first stepped on the University of Illinois campus as a freshman in 1963. (Go ahead, do the math, I don’t mind.) I started writing columns – humor columns, basically, observation-of-life pieces – as a sophomore at Lanphier High School in Springfield, IL.

At that time, Springfield had recently instituted a junior high school system and segregated the 7th through 9th graders in the junior highs, so sophomore became the new freshman in high school. I’d been somewhat of a star of my middle school newspaper, so naturally expected to dive right in to the Lanphier paper, but was stopped by The Rule. The one that limited the newspaper staff to juniors and seniors.

Seeing as how I really didn’t have much self-identity beyond “writer” back then, this was just not a situation I could easily accept. So I grabbed the one rope that was available and wrote a couple columns as free-lance submissions. (With cartoon illustrations, even, if I remember correctly!) And here’s where we find a potentially great movie scene if this were a movie script instead of a fledgling blog entry: the teacher who was in charge of the school paper read my columns and not only published them, she asked me to join the staff of the paper right then and there, instead of waiting until the next year. Significant background music, please.

I also wrote columns for the Springfield daily, the Journal-Register. That happened because I worked there. And that happened because my father somehow pulled some string or other to get me the job. I was 15 and had decided it was time to have an independent income, and wanted to work at the newspaper, which wasn’t in any way indicating that it was looking for 15-year old ace reporters. But somehow my father got me hired, and since dad was a crook – and that’s not a euphemism, it’s a fact, but let’s save that for another day – I never asked any questions about his strings.

OK, cue up the music, another scene is coming … I was hired to work for the editorial page editor, a rough-spoken, cigar-chewing, middle-aged guy who epitomized every hard-boiled reporter you’ve ever seen in any movie. Since I don’t remember his name, let’s call him Mac.

Mac was not happy to be handed a dumpy, naive teen-age type and told to give her something to do. And his not happiness was totally obvious, he did nothing to hide it.
With a lot of grumping and cigar gnashing he marched me to the newspaper’s “morgue,” a windowless room filled with old editions saved on rolls and rolls and rolls and more rolls of microfiche. Then he told me to read editions from 100 years earlier, and 50, and 20, and find some delightful little nugget of news from each. In other words, my first professional assignment was to write the daily memory column. OK. Great. I could do that. No problem, boss. I didn’t actually say that, but I must have looked it, because he responded by scowling and looking even more disgusted before he humphed his way out of the room.

He had shown me where the microfiche was stored and how it was catalogued, he had set me up with a chair and a little typing table and a manual typewriter. (Remember, this was circa 1960, waaaaaaay before the days of computer keyboards and all the electronic miracles we now take for granted.) And he gave me a stack of yellowish newsprint to type on. But he didn’t give me a pencil. I had to borrow one from the morgue lady.

Which is why, when he came back a bit later to check on my progress, and found me writing out my first story in longhand on the newsprint, he was astounded. He just stood there, in the doorway of the morgue, staring at me as if I were some slimy thing that had crawled out from under a rock, and asked me what the ___ I was doing. “I’m writing my story.” What was the problem? He had told me to write it, hadn’t he? “And then I’ll type it.” Bzzzz, wrong answer!

Mac then proceeded to inform me, as tersely and with as much irritation as possible, that a real reporter wrote directly on the keyboard and that he wasn’t paying me to take twice as long as necessary to write the memory column and that I was to immediately stop writing it first in longhand, or else. OK, he didn’t say “or else,” but I heard it pretty clearly.

Left alone again in the morgue (not counting the morgue lady, since she’s not part of this scene), I sat there for a minute looking at the typewriter as if it were an alien from the planet Zagroff. Translate thoughts in my head directly through my fingers to a keyboard? What an amazing new idea! Could I do it? I didn’t know, but clearly I would have to try.

And here I am today, pounding away on this (relatively) tiny white plastic Mac keyboard, with keys that click instead of clank when you press them, writing my first blog, with no intermediate step, from brain straight to keyboard. And all thanks to Mac, who hated me but made possible everything that came next.

But that’s enough torture to put you through for one day, let’s just stop here and stick in a “to be continued” for the next blog. If there is one. Which may take another good dose of daughter-challenging. Or some feedback from whoever is actually reading this thing, if anyone. After all, it’s been many centuries since I wrote like this – OK, actually it’s only been a few years, I forgot about the columns in the DI a couple summers ago – but I’ve never written a blog before so I’m feeling a little nervous and self-conscious about the whole venture. And if that isn’t a blatant enough appeal for positive reinforcement, I don’t know what else would qualify.

Let’s end this in the old newspaper way.

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