Eye on the Edge

My little corner of the universe

2012-02-05T06:32:00.000-08:00

Unknown women at airport in Skopje

I took a picture of these women while I was waiting to leave Skopje, Macedonia, in April 2009. I didn't ask their permission (I'm sure we didn't speak the same language anyway), and I pretended to be focusing in another direction and snapped it. They enchanted me, just thinking about the focus of their lives, how they spend each day. They must be Muslims, from their head coverings, and matrons, probably mothers or grandmothers. Going from Skopje to somewhere else, obviously friends or relatives, and probably have not traveled much in the world. I was eavesdropping with my camera.

There are so many people in the world, so many different experiences of life, and I've been fortunate to have traveled a fair amount into many different environments. From the mountains of the Andes, to China and Vietnam, I have met people as different from me as one could imagine. And yet, we all have lives that matter to us and our families, with each of us trying to find our own little corner of the universe where we belong.

I was fortunate to have lived in Puerto Rico for several years and learned to speak some Spanish. Although I don't practice it much, when I traveled to Peru I was able to study it again and use it pretty well. When I knew I was going to be traveling to Paris, I took a French class but my Spanish kept clogging up my brain when I tried to learn to speak French. In Paris I was at a tremendous disadvantage being unable to speak the language and was treated as a bothersome tourist, and many servers took advantage of it, charging me more and ignoring me. I felt out of place, and of course I was.

Learning to communicate with other people who don't speak the same language is not difficult in most places, and given enough time, most of us learn the essentials and accommodate each other as best we can. I have had people communicate with me through pantomime and knew exactly what they were telling me. Although most Americans believe that in most places there is at least a little English, I have found that not to be the case. Although in China most people study English in school, they never hear it spoken and consequently have a difficult time communicating in the language. I carried a business card with me when I entered a taxi in China, showing my destination to the driver; otherwise I wouldn't have been able to get around that way.

This past week, I noticed a trio who have been taking the bus at the same time every day, when I am traveling home after going out for my morning coffee and class. An older woman and a younger couple, and they were speaking to each other in a foreign language. I thought I understood it to be Russian, so I asked the man (who was sitting next to me) where he is from. Speaking with a heavy accent, he said, "Russia." When they arrived at the technical college (their destination), I said, "Do svidaniya!" (I learned to say goodbye and thank you while in Russia, and I was pretty sure this was the correct salutation.) The younger woman turned and flashed me the most brilliant smile as they disembarked.

The next day, there they were again, and this time the woman came up to me and said, "You speak Russian?" I explained that I only knew two words, other than Da and Nyet, that is, and she told me how to say hello: Zdravstvujtye. When I got home, I explained to Smart Guy about my adventure, and he taught me how to say hello in a way I could remember (he took Russian in college). I also got on YouTube and listened to the pronunciation over and over. The next day I greeted Irina with it (I discovered her name that day), and she was so pleased. This time, she sat next to me and we "talked" together. I learned that she and her husband have been in the United States since mid-November and are from Siberia. She told me the name of her town, but I couldn't even begin to remember it. The older woman is another Russian taking the English class, but they are not related.

Before we had arrived at the college, I ascertained that her daughter lives here and has been in Bellingham for six years. Her daughter has an 18-year-old son and an infant daughter, which I assume is the reason that Irina came here, to help with her newest grandchild. Her grandson went to Russia for two years when he was nine and learned quite a bit of Russian but has forgotten most of it. Irina is practicing her limited English with me, and we are now friends. I look forward to our interaction and I know she does, too. Her husband smiles at me, but she is the one who makes a tremendous effort to speak English with me. She told me she is fifty (she doesn't look it at all). She knew no English when she arrived and is learning quickly, but we use pantomime and laughter to bridge the gap when communication breaks down.

I myself have been helped by strangers to navigate a strange country, and it makes me very happy to listen to Irina's first attempts at speaking English. Knowing that there is no substitution for interaction, I am pleased to have made a new friend from Siberia. Irina has her own little corner of her universe, but she has stepped out into the wider world, and hopefully she will be treated well and will have a good impression of my chosen home town. I realize that she must miss her home and her own country. She hasn't even been here three months and she's already taking classes and interacting with strangers on the bus.

When I contemplate the vast number of people in the world and the number of languages we speak, it's amazing that we can communicate with each other so well. Each of us also feels most at home in a place where we can understand the conversations swirling around us and know the names of the streets and towns nearby, but getting out of our comfort zone and traveling the wider world makes us all better people. That's what I think, anyway.

Now that I am older and have most of my foreign travels behind me, I find comfort and reassurance in reaching out to those fellow travelers and realize that I am at home right here, my own little corner of the universe. I've traveled around and chosen my place, rather than having it given to me. Growing up as a child with no home town, since we lived wherever my father was stationed, I chose Boulder for my first home town, and Bellingham as the town for my retirement years. I think I've chosen well.

Wheat and sugar blues

2012-01-29T06:56:00.000-08:00

I looked at these cream puffs at the coffee shop and wished I could eat one. It had been three months since I last ate any wheat or sugar, but this last week, I indulged. While at the movies, I realized I would need something to tide me over until dinnertime, and while I waited for my friend Judy to arrive, I perused the offerings. A very enticing chocolate cookie made by a local bakery caught my eye, and I thought to myself that I could share it with Judy. By the time she arrived, however, it was gone. Completely. Biting into it, I realized that it was not only rich and tasty, with chunks of melting chocolate, but the texture was also completely scrumptious. It was very enjoyable.

In some ways I am fortunate that I have a reaction to sugar when I haven't eaten it in awhile. During the entire movie, my heart pounded and I felt a little shaky and broke out in a sweat. It's a familiar feeling I get when I eat something sugary and rich on an empty stomach, and indicates to me that my insulin level has just spiked. It wasn't until we were in the restaurant later that my body felt totally normal again. I ate a tuna sandwich (more wheat) and was just fine after that. The tendency toward diabetes runs in my family, and I have little doubt that if I ate a normal American diet, by this time in my life I would be either pre-diabetic or completely so. My grandfather died of it at 62, and my mother developed Type II diabetes in her forties. One of my younger sisters takes insulin shots for it.

The mechanism of how insulin spikes work is this:

In normal physiology, the body is able to balance the glucose (sugar levels) in the bloodstream. When a person eats, and glucose levels start to rise, the body signals the pancreas to secrete insulin. Insulin "unlocks the door" to cells in the body so that the glucose can be used for energy. When blood sugar levels drop, insulin production decreases and the liver begins producing glucose.

Apparently when my blood sugar levels begin to drop, they don't stop dropping until I become mildly hypoglycemic and I experience that feeling described above. Once I return to eating a diet low in simple carbohydrates, I don't get those uncomfortable feelings when I eat. It's a good way to keep myself on the path of eating what agrees with me. When I've had my fasting blood sugar checked, it's always been within normal limits, but I suspect that there is some imbalance in either my pancreas or my liver that doesn't work as it should. I could worry about it, but I've found that if I am cautious about what I eat, it doesn't happen at all. Every once in awhile I guess I need to remember that. The cookie did its work.

There is another side effect of falling off the wagon: I begin to crave sweets. It's impossible for me to know if this is physiological or completely emotional, but those cream puffs caught my eye and I decided to take a picture of them since I wouldn't allow myself to have one. I imagined biting into it, feeling the creaminess of the chocolate and the soft whipped cream inside the shell... ooohhh. Heaven for a little while. Then I remembered how I would feel afterwards, and I was able to resist.

The other trick I have is to carry some raw almonds and walnuts in a little baggie inside my purse or pocket, so that I can have something that takes away any hunger and is good for me. I never have reactions from them, no matter how hungry I am. Within a few minutes, my hunger is gone and I feel just right. I had forgotten to put any in my pocket for the movies, which is why this whole treadmill has started again. It's important for me to remind myself that the craving will diminish as long as I don't indulge again any time soon.

I don't think I had any reaction to the wheat itself. I read the book Wheat Belly (as opposed to Beer Belly) and have found it true that my belly has diminished in size over the past three months. I am no longer dieting per se, but my body seems to be redistributing my fat deposits. I keep being surprised when I put on a favorite pair of pants and find that they are loose, although I haven't lost any more weight. The only thing I have changed in these past three months is to stay away from wheat and sugar.

There is one other rather interesting side effect: my mood is much improved, and it's the depths of winter right now. Other than the Christmas season when I was robbed (I wrote about it here), I've been in a really good mood. Could it be the diet? If you read the book, the author swears that your mood will improve if you get rid of wheat. I don't have any way to know how I would be feeling otherwise, which is always a problem if you try to figure out what changes what. I'm also possibly susceptible to suggestion. Who knows? I'll take it, whatever the reason.

Since my little foray into wheat and sugar, the only thing I still notice, a week later, is that my eye tends to drift toward the dessert tray at the coffee shop a little more often. I know that will eventually diminish, unless I indulge again. Then I remember that awful shaky sweaty feeling, and that helps me decide to look at the pretty clouds in the sky outside, instead.

March family reunion

2012-01-22T07:23:00.000-08:00

Me, Norma Jean, PJ, Buz, Markee, Fia, oldest to youngest

Last year I traveled to Texas in March for a family reunion and to finish the celebration of Pete's life with the rest of our family. Norma Jean didn't want the entire clan to descend upon her little mobile home when Pete died, so we made arrangements to gather in Texas to give us all a chance to be together once more and to celebrate the man we all loved.

I also got another chance to spend time with Norma Jean, Allison and her beautiful child Lexie. She's grown so much in a year, but then again, she was only nine months old then, and now she's a toddler, with a full set of teeth! Allison had this picture taken and added to her Christmas card this year. She is certainly a happy child.

There is an incredible number of people around when you have five siblings who are all married and have families. At one point I think we had two or three dozen of us together, with barking dogs, shouting kids, and laughing adults. A madhouse. Every one of the young children are right around the age my grandchildren would be, if I had any, that is. Actually, now that I think of it, Chris would be fifty right now and could be a grandfather himself and I could be a great-grandmother! How quickly time flies by.

Although it was hard to travel again so soon after having spent three weeks in Florida with Norma Jean, it was wonderful to reconnect with my family again. The ones we really missed, though, are our parents, who seemed to peek out every now and then in the expression or mannerism of one of my siblings. Although I don't have any living children or grandchildren, I will never lack for family to love and be with if I choose it. Here in this part of the country where I live now, I've made friends and have a life that fulfills me, and because of iChat and Skype, I can visit with many of my family members any time I want. This technology makes all the difference in my sense of being connected. We live in a very interesting time.

I haven't traveled again since last March, unless you can count the numerous local trips I took with my Trailblazer friends. This past summer was filled with our regular Thursday outings, plus six or seven extra ones to new and different parts of the state. I learned so much and wrote a post on my other blog about my favorite hikes this past summer.

Now we are in the depths of winter, and the cold and snow of last week has given way to our usual wind and rain. At least the driving is reasonable again, but it seems a long time ago, more than a year, that I visited my family, and a long time ago (more than a few months) that I spent my days hiking in the sunshine, taking pictures of flowers and mountain vistas. These days are spent reading, blogging, talking with Smart Guy and just basically feeling more housebound than usual. I realize how much I enjoy being outdoors, when I'm dressed for the weather and active. We haven't gone snowshoeing yet this year, since the snow took its time getting here and now the avalanche danger is very high.

When I read the posts of my blogging family, it's clear that many of us are feeling a bit of nostalgia for other seasons. Some of my bloggers are in the Southern Hemisphere and dealing with heat and humidity. It makes me realize how insular my view of time and the world is. A year is a long time when I think of the change that has happened, and it's a very short time when I look at the longer view. The older I get, the smaller a percentage a year takes up in my entire lifetime, so maybe that's one reason it seems to have gone by fast.

And then I think of the many long dark days before the birds will be singing outside my window before I wake. This morning I am sitting in bed, laptop perched in my lap, and it's dark and silent outside. It's after 7:00am -- in the middle of summer the sun rises three hours earlier. It will come around and I'll wonder when that happened. Slowly, a minute or two each day... change comes on little cat feet.

Florida in February

2012-01-15T07:00:00.000-08:00

BetMar Retirement Community grounds on a foggy morning

Last February I spent three weeks in Florida with my sister Norma Jean. It's been almost a year since my brother-in-law Pete died on February 10. His death was not unexpected, since he knew he was dying of emphysema and COPD. At the young age of 67, no less. He was a lifelong smoker and was unable to give it up, even though he knew it would cost him his life. Pete started a blog in 2010 and wrote over a hundred posts, a legacy of his writing and viewpoints that I cherish. Nobody could write quite like Pete, and he wrote several of them while he was suffering from low oxygen levels. Nevertheless, they are still very well written and give a little taste of who he was. Here's one of the last ones, called "Hop, Skip, and Off to Hospice We Go!" -- I just now re-read it and Pete's character jumped off the page and into my heart. I didn't expect to make this post into a remembrance of him, but sometimes you've just got to go with the flow.

I didn't intend to go to Florida, but a few days after he passed, my niece Allison (who was there with her mom when he died) called to tell me that Norma Jean's little long-haired chihuahua Moose had been run over and killed right in front of her house, and she was simply devastated by the double whammy. That happened on the 15th and I arrived on the 17th. I slept on the couch on her back porch, while Allison with her infant daughter Lexie slept in Norma Jean's bedroom together, and Peter (her son) slept in Pete's office. One by one they would leave; first Peter, then Allison and Lexie, and finally I was alone with Norma Jean. But before they went back to their lives, we had a celebration of Pete's life. Pete did not want a funeral or any fuss made over him, but we pondered the whole idea of holding something for those of us left behind. A celebration of his life seemed appropriate. On the 20th, we carried some of his art (he was a gifted photographer) to one of the clubhouses located on the BetMar Retirement Community grounds. His motorcycle friends and many people from around the community showed up.

His son Peter constructed a slide show that rotated hundreds of pictures of Pete during his life. One of Pete's most successful photographs is displayed above the monitor, "Sunrise over Tampa Bay." It was a very fitting celebration, but it was also very hard on all of us. We trudged through day after day, just trying to make it through the hardest part of the grief. I would wake in the middle of the night to the flickering of images reflected on the wall, and I'd realize that Norma Jean couldn't sleep and was up watching TV. She used headphones so I wouldn't have known except for the light. I wasn't sleeping all that well, either. I'd get up and we would talk, for hours. We would talk, laugh, and cry together and watch the sun come up. But the three weeks finally passed and it was time for me to return home.

Many of the family members felt it was important to get Norma Jean another dog, and she and I went to websites to figure out how to get a rescue dog. Before long we ended up with two of them, and I hoped that when I left it would give her something to fill her days. She eventually decided to go to Michigan and spend three months in the town where her son Peter lived. She turned the dogs back to the rescue organization (you are required to do that) traveled first to visit her daughter Allison and then soon after for those three months in Michigan. It was too soon to bring those dogs into her life, I know that now, and I suspected it while I was there. She needed more time.

Now she has a wonderful little dog, a Papillon puppy she named Icarus (because of the ears, you see) but it has been shortened to Icky. A bit unfortunate, maybe, but the dog is perfect for her now. And her son Peter was laid off from his job in Michigan and is living with her temporarily. He brought HIS dog with him, a little Jack Russell terrier named Zen, and so two dogs run and play again in the house. I am familiar with them because of the changes that happened in my own life because of my three weeks in Florida.

First, Norma Jean swims every day for exercise, so I began to join her. She had not been swimming since Pete died, and as normality began to return in her life, she decided to start swimming again. I myself had not swum laps for exercise in decades, so I was at a disadvantage, but I remembered how to breathe and just... started. It was incredibly hard to find a pace I could maintain, and at first I couldn't go more than a few lengths before I had to catch my breath. Before I left Florida, however, I could swim ten laps without stopping. When I returned home, I decided to use the pool at the YMCA (where I work out) and see how it progressed. Now swimming laps once or twice a week is part of my repertoire.

The other major change is that I talk with Norma Jean two or three times a week on iChat. Now that I've been there with her, it's easy to fall into the same routine we had then: somehow we never seem to run out of things to say, to share, to talk about. And recently I discovered how to send her pictures while we're chatting, and now I save them up so she can see the birds or other scenery I want to share with her. Of course she reads my blogs, but it's so much nicer when I'm looking at her and we are doing things together. The added bonus of seeing her makes it seem very much more immediate and intimate. I miss being with her, but nowhere near as much as I would have without iChat or Skype.

Looking back at the past year, I realize how incredibly full it was. The new year, 2012, is likely (God willing) to be much less so. I traveled twice in a year's time because of major loss, and I'm hoping that nothing like that will happen this year. It's a Leap Year, too. Smart Guy and I will both turn 70 this year, and of course it's also supposed to be the end of the world in December. I'm hoping I'll get to have a satisfying retrospective in January 2013. Most likely I will.

In March 2011 I got to visit my family in Texas and had another reunion. I'll revisit that trip next week. Until then, I hope that you have a wonderful week, filled with sunshine and even snow, if that's what you want. It's almost 7:00am and I'm getting hungry and ready to start the rest of my Sunday.

Resolutions and retrospective

2012-01-08T06:43:00.000-08:00

Every new year I make a resolution or two, as most people do. And as the numbers of the year turn from one year to the next, it seems like a good time to look back on the past year and see how successful I was. Last year I saw a new doctor in January (because of the change in Medicare coverage) and learned that I had gained ten pounds since the last time I'd visited a doctor. When you're short like me, that's a significant amount of weight. I decided to start counting calories, and I wrote a post on my other blog about it, which I called "The long slog toward slim."

This January 2012, I have lost all the weight I wanted to lose, and then some. I wanted to lose the ten pounds but have actually lost 18 in total. I'm now thinner than I have been for years, probably since 2005 when this picture was taken.

I remember looking wistfully at this picture last January and wishing I would be able to wear those jeans again without a roll over the top. And now I can. In fact, the strange part is that I wonder now how come I allowed myself to gain weight in the first place. I continue to be active and exercise plenty. But I also had become fond of eating late in the day. It doesn't take many extra calories to add on ten pounds. Conversely, it doesn't take much of a calorie deficit for the weight to begin to fall away.

The hard part was getting started. Counting calories and using an online food diary taught me many things, not the least of which is that some of my food choices were adding calories that I could easily skip. I started counting out the nuts I eat every day (raw almonds and walnuts) so I could add them to the diary, and I experimented with ways to get sugar out of my diet. A scale helped me understand how much a portion was supposed to be. I kept my calories to 1500 per day and was rewarded with pretty consistent weight loss until I hit a plateau after I had lost about eight pounds. Since my new eating plan had become familiar by then, it wasn't hard to keep at it until I began to lose again.

Last year I read two books that helped me a lot: Mindless Eating and The End of Overeating. Of course I had already read all of Michael Pollan's wonderful books about food. It is endlessly satisfying to read books about food when I'm trying to understand my own relationship to it. I've been a vegetarian for decades (well, a pescatarian anyway, since I eat fish) and things like bacon and steak don't even look like food to me any more. But it's really easy to gain weight by eating too many carbohydrates, especially the simple carbs. That's what I had been doing, and now I'm eating more protein and fat and limiting the amount of gluten foods in my diet. I continue to eat lots of veggies every day, but I was doing that before.

Not long ago I learned that two-thirds of all Americans are overweight. A full third of us are obese, many morbidly obese. The health effects of obesity are well known, but the problem is that our diets are apparently designed to keep us eating more and more. I know that when I eat something high in added sugar, I want more of it, even when I'm full. If I don't eat it in the first place, I lose the desire to overeat. Or I eat something else, something better for me.

Hmmm. This is not where I thought I would be going with this post, but it's a good one. It never ceases to amaze me that reading about food and food choices, diets, and body image is endlessly fascinating, to me at least. What I was hoping to do when I first started this post was to write about the past year's events. I started with the January doctor's visit and it ended up filling the post with food and weight issues. Maybe the thing to do is cover each eventful month one at a time. By the time spring rolls around, I'll have finished the entire year of 2011.

One nice thing about blogging is having the ability to go back and read how I felt a year ago. I've been writing this blog since December 2009. I started writing my own history and then got into the habit of pondering where I am today, giving myself permission to write whatever comes into my head once a week. On this blog I don't use labels or have much of anything in the sidebar except the chronological march of posts. Even so, this will be my 115th post, writing once a week.

And over the past two years, I have found a community of fellow bloggers, friends from around the world who delight me and challenge me by leaving perceptive comments. These sometimes spark new directions and avenues in my thinking that I find to be rather addicting. Thank you for being part of my life. I am enriched by our interaction and continue to gain strength and courage from you.

New Year's Day 2012

2012-01-01T07:07:00.000-08:00

Craig Marker

I found this picture on line and need to go back and learn more about Andi Levin, who writes her blog from Seattle and sounds very interesting. I wanted a picture of the Space Needle at New Years and found this picture on her blog from last year's celebration. Her blog title is "Are we falling or flying... and will we ever know?" As a skydiver, I think I know the answer to that one: both. We are doing both.

Last night when the new year began, I was asleep and awakened by firecrackers going off. The bedside clock confirmed it: midnight. The sounds faded after a short while and I fell asleep again. Fortunately the neighbors must have put their dogs inside for the evening, because I didn't hear them barking. But then again, they might have been cowering in fear. Fireworks are not my favorite thing, either. At least I know what is causing the ruckus; they don't.

Yesterday was truly a turning point for me in regards to the theft I wrote about last week. Christmas Eve and New Year's Eve were night and day from each other. My recovery from the event is almost complete now, although I will always have lost money and security that will not come back. My sense of vigilance is heightened and I don't think I will ever be as trusting as I was before.

This morning I woke from a strange dream. I was in a restaurant with friends and had put my purse under the table. We were enjoying an ice cream dish together, when another woman cried out that her purse was taken. I looked under the table and mine was gone, too. Although the sense of loss was great, I knew that my driver's license and credit card were with me and not in my purse, and I was glad for me and sorry for my friend who was not so lucky. While lamenting our losses, a man walked up and stood in front of us, and he had my keys and pictures that had been taken in the theft. I looked at my old driver's license and a picture of my son Chris. I cried with gratitude.

And then I woke up, looked at the clock and realized I had slept longer than usual. I pondered the meaning of the dream as I made my tea, and now I'm here drinking it and writing off the top of my head, with little idea of the direction I want to take this post. It's a new year, and I read all my friends' new posts and left comments. It's my usual morning activity, sitting up in bed in the dark with my partner asleep beside me. The clicking of the keys is the only sound; it's my favorite time of the day.

The Serenity Prayer has been uppermost in my mind this past week. Most of us know it, but here is the first stanza:

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 was written by Reinhold Niebuhr, I discovered in my google search just now. I've seen his name before but just learned that he was a theologian who died in 1971. I'll go study that link a bit more once I'm finished with this post. This is what happens to me these days: I look something up and head off on a tangent without meaning to. Our world is so incredibly connected, plugged in, and information of all kinds instantly available at my fingertips, so a little discipline is needed here. I feel the need to say something I haven't yet expressed.

Thinking about three important words in that poem: serenity, courage, and wisdom. It's not an easy thing to be serene when things are going awry all around you. It's much easier to feel confusion and become suspicious of everyone. That is anything but serenity. I have fought to find some serenity during this past week, and I have been moderately successful. It's taken a fair amount of work and the passage of time.

Courage. Today I will go back to Lake Padden to celebrate the new year with my walking friends. It's not an easy thing to make myself go back to the scene of the crime, but if I don't take my courage in my hands and live my life in the way I desire, I will be even more of a victim. The impact of this theft has been huge on my psyche, and I wonder how I would recover these days from an even larger tragedy. I'm nowhere near as resilient as I was a decade ago when my son Chris died. And back then I suffered terribly for a long time, but I did eventually learn to smile and laugh again.

Wisdom. Ah, that word. The dictionary tells me it means "the quality of having experience, knowledge, and good judgment." You cannot be a wise person without going through a fair bit of life's roller coaster of highs and lows. I do realize that being almost seventy has given me a fair bit of wisdom, and my desire to be a good person has caused me to think and rethink my actions. I wish for myself and for all of you, my blogging family, wisdom. I am learning to know the difference between what I can and cannot change, and I will gather my courage and do what I can in this new year.

There is a fourth important word in that poem: change. It's a constant thing in our lives, sometimes small and imperceptible, other times a momentous event that keeps us from continuing on in the same trajectory. But one thing I know: nothing and nobody escapes change. We can sometimes choose the direction of change, sometimes we can't. But change can be positive as well as negative.

Blessings to you at this time, and may the coming year bring us all joy and prosperity. It's a big wish, but I think we can do it if we try...

Christmas Day 2011

2011-12-24T18:55:00.001-08:00

This is what the passenger side window on my car looks like today. I took this picture with my old (and now only) camera of the theft of my purse at Lake Padden. I don't want to rehash what I wrote on my other blog, which I've linked if you are interested in the details. Right now I want to clear myself of the feelings I'm experiencing, so that I can enjoy the quiet beauty of the day.

Last year I was traveling home from Boulder, my first trip back since I left in April 2008. It was loss of another, more devastating kind that took me there. I wrote about it here on the Sunday following last Christmas. My habit of writing in this blog on Sundays gives me a sense of continuity of emotions. Last year I had to deal with the loss of my beautiful Emily, a far worse kind of loss than this one today. I'm growing accustomed to finding ways to deal with the constant need to let go of possessions, even the hardest of them, of friendships and family who mean everything to me.

Although now I am still feeling a sense of violation, knowing that the thieves know where I live, have a key to my car, are looking through my un-password protected iPad2, probably smiling at the pictures still in my camera, they are the losers here. They are the losers because they will one day be caught, probably not because of me, but because they will continue until something goes wrong with their scheme. As some pointed out on my other blog, the first thing they did was fill their car with gas and go grocery shopping. Perhaps they are out of work and stealing to make ends meet. It's a lucrative thing to do: I was surprised to find that the charges on my cards will be covered by the bank, but they will keep the goods they purchased before the cards stopped working.

I am thinking of someone here in my home town having a nice Christmas dinner with those groceries. The Starbucks cards will give them coffee and treats for quite a while. Whatever they bought at Rite Aid (which is not only a pharmacy but has just about everything else) will most likely be useful things. I couldn't see what they charged on my credit card, just the amounts, but I am picturing them as being something they really needed. I wanted to gift the needy in some way, and inadvertently, that's just what I did. But it will be the last time. Password protection and never again leaving anything of value in my car will make sure of that, since my car will never feel secure again, as long as I know they have a key to it and know where I live. But I will not hate them.

In this crowded world where there are so many who cannot survive without taking from others, it's only going to get worse. I saw the movie "Contagion" this year that showed Matt Damon playing a father trying to protect his family as people began to die and civilization began to break down. A scene of him seeing the family in the house across from his being systematically gunned down to steal the food in their kitchen, because there was no other way to get food, chilled me then, and chills me even more now. I know in my heart that once it becomes that bad, those with guns will not hesitate to kill me for what I have. As the police pointed out to me yesterday when I was so distraught, at least I am not dead and will recover from this.

What choices I still have about how to deal with this, now that I think I have stopped the hemorrhaging of loss, lie entirely within my heart. Yesterday was too soon for me to do anything but cry and moan, but today is a day of renewal and joy. The light is beginning to return to the skies, although the days are merely seconds longer than the days before, but they will continue to grow longer and spring cannot be far behind. Seasons only last a few months, and while we are busy living our lives, loving those who matter to us, imperceptible change begins to take place. One day, not too long from now, I'll realize that I'm healed and stronger than before.

So I can say with the tiniest bit of Christmas cheer, be joyful today. Hug your loved ones to you and realize that they, too, could be gone in an instant, but be glad you have them today. The present moment is really all we have. But love never, ever goes away.

Ghosts of Christmases past

2011-12-18T07:00:00.001-08:00

Christmas with Mama and Daddy

I don't know who took the picture, but I suspect it was my aunt or grandmother, since I think we are in their home. It was such a long time ago, but it began my childhood appreciation of Christmastime. And here we are again, as the planet moves around the sun and completes the journey to the winter solstice once more. Four years since I retired and we moved to the Pacific Northwest; how time flies.

Last year at this time I got the news about my dear friend Emily, that she was severely injured from a parachuting accident gone bad. Then I learned that she died. A year ago today I was on the phone getting reservations to fly back to Colorado for the first time since I left. I spent less than a week there and came back home on Christmas Day. It was a terribly hard time, but I saw so many of my friends again and realized with amazement how much I had changed in just a few short years. I had transferred my affections for my previous home town, Boulder, to my new home seamlessly. There is nothing more for me in Colorado, except for the friends of my heart who will always be part of me.

If I were in Texas visiting my siblings and their incredibly huge families, I'd be enveloped in the flurry of visits, parties, Christmas trees, presents, shopping. But since I'm here in Bellingham with my partner who feels as I do, a quiet enjoyment of the season is enough. We don't have to be part of the craziness unless we want to, and we are happy to have a nice Christmas dinner together and buy ourselves anything we might desire. I ordered a new fluffy bathrobe for myself and am wearing it now, my Christmas present to myself. I will give gifts of food to my neighbors, and we have already attended the one party we wouldn't miss. It's enough.

But oh, how I remember the Christmas wishing of my childhood! I would sit and ponder what I wanted to receive from Santa, what desires might be fulfilled. I know I wanted a bride doll one year, and when I would look at her in the window of the store, I was filled with longing. Norma Jean and I actually crept into our parents' closet one year and found our Christmas presents. We stealthily opened them to see what we were getting before wrapping them back up. I think I was the instigator, being the older sister. Since I did that, I well remember the pretty dress I would receive. It's one of the few I recall.

I don't remember at all what I might have bought for other people. When I was young, it was all about the getting, not the giving of Christmas. Now that I am older, that has turned around completely. The enjoyment I receive these days is all from giving things to others, little things that show appreciation and love. Yesterday I finally sent off a pair of my earrings that Norma Jean admired one day on iChat. They just weren't "me" so I was happy to pass them on to her. She loves earrings.

My closet is filled with clothes that I don't wear any more, and I'd like to get those passed along to the right people. I had hoped to do it before Christmas, but it's only a week away now, and I'm not sure I'll get it done before then. I recently gave away some silk scarves I don't wear any more, and that was really fun, making me happy and bringing cheer to other people too.

At the party the other day, one of my friends told me she's got a tree in a pot that she brings in every year to decorate, but a chickadee has built a bird's nest in it that she doesn't want to disturb, so that it can be used again in the springtime. She always has live trees, she told me, because one of the things that bothers her about Christmas is the murder of so many trees. When I was a kid, though, one of my favorite things to do at Christmas time was to lie on my back with my head under the tree, looking up at the sparkling lights, the ornaments glinting, and let the incredible smell of the tree fill me with delight. That smell, along with the smell of gingerbread, takes me back to Christmases past.

Now that I am older, it seems that acquiring things has become more of a burden than a pleasure. Since I don't lack for much, and I seem to have plenty of food and warm clothes to wear, there's not much to wish for any more. My last big purchase was a raincoat that will hopefully keep me dry when hiking in the hills and mountains around town. Next Sunday will be Christmas Day, and until then, I'll reminisce about Christmases gone by while enjoying the present moment.

The passage of time

2011-12-11T06:05:00.001-08:00

Last night I picked up one of my old journals that I kept during the 1980s, wondering what I would talk about this Sunday morning. Those numbered journals began in February 1982 and petered out by the time 1990 rolled around. They all started with me deciding I needed to keep a food journal and see what I felt about the food I ate. Of course, it didn't stay just about food for long, because I found the experience of journaling, writing what would not be read by anybody but me, very valuable and cathartic. The one I picked up was #13, covering the period September 1985 to March 1986. I looked up my birthday to see who I was back then.

It was easy to remember who wrote all these words, but it's not the me of today. Twenty-six years later, the person sitting in Bellingham, composing on her laptop, bears very little resemblance to the 43-year-old young person who wrote this:

Mama and I finally had a fight. It cleared the air but was very traumatic to me. More than to her, I think. She finally let me take her blood sugar, and it was amazingly good. It confused me, because I was so sure it would be terrible. We started to argue, I don't know now just what the trigger was, but I let her know my visit was awful and I wouldn't be coming back at Christmas.

I went into the bathroom to cry and when I came out she insisted that we "have a talk." The talk went on for at least an hour, maybe two, with me telling her all that I had been holding in since my arrival, all the resentments about her drinking, her friends, her lifestyle. Soon it became clear to me that nothing would make me happy but to have her (1) stop drinking completely, (2) eat only the best foods for her, (3) walk at least a mile a day, and (4) renounce her affection for her other children and see me as the best, most accomplished and devoted.

In 1985, I had not discovered skydiving. That wouldn't happen for another six years. My mother was still alive and had not yet gone through all the pain and suffering that awaited her. She died in 1993. My son Chris was still alive and healthy, and I had not yet met my life partner. I spent almost thirty years working for the same organization, and when I had my birthday in 1985, I had only been working there for six years. So many days, weeks, months, and years have flown by.

It is interesting to realize that time passes and changes are invisible from day to day. Each day I am a little older, a little different than the day before, but until I look back, until something like these journals gives me a glimpse into the past, I don't have any way to measure the imperceptible change. I remember illnesses and injuries, births and deaths, but the day-to-day life I live is also flowing by, the passage of time like a deep gentle river. The little soul perched on a leaf that makes its way along the river doesn't notice the changes on the river's bank. All it sees is the river and its vessel, the leaf.

When I wrote those words in 1985, I wanted my mother never to leave me. I knew that she would and was hoping that if she did what I wanted, she wouldn't die. She wasn't even as old as I am today. But you only have one mother, and I guess it's normal to try to keep that person from changing. We all know this is impossible, but it doesn't keep us from trying. It's the same reason that we dye our hair, get facelifts, exercise obsessively and diet: to stave off the inevitable passage of time.

Once in awhile, I will wonder about these things. I might catch an image of myself in a passing window and wonder when I got old. My hair is completely white now, the wrinkles on my face a permanent part of me, not a visitor that has any intention of leaving. I don't really mind, I feel fortunate to still have a vessel that works well. I know that will change, too, but for now I am happy to see that the old Leaf has most of its parts and is still on top of the water.

Birthdays

2011-12-04T05:43:00.001-08:00

This past week, birthdays have been on my mind, since I just had the last one of my sixties and now look forward to beginning my seventieth year. That's a lot of birthdays. Funny how few of them I remember, but I guess that's true for all of us: unless something causes it to stand out, all the days of our lives blend together in memory. The only birthday I remember as a kid was my tenth.

In 1952, Mama was only 29 and had borne three children, all girls. Daddy was 35 and an officer in the Air Force, stationed at Fairfield Air Force Base in California. I have very little recollection of their relationship. It was invisible to me as I grew up, which must be a good sign. No childhood memories of fights or discord. But it must have been there, since Daddy liked to drink and as an adult, I know it marred much of their happiness. Mama drank, too, but I think it was because she wanted to join Daddy in his activities and grew to like it.

The Officers' Club had Monte Carlo Night every once in awhile, and on December 1st of that year, Daddy didn't come home. He was supposed to bring a present for me and just simply never came home. Instead, he went to gamble at the Officers' Club and probably drank way too much. The only reason I know this is that Mama was distraught and told me where Daddy was, that he had forgotten it was my birthday. We waited and waited for him to arrive, but he never did. No present for me, and I cried when I went to bed because I had been forgotten by Daddy. Mama was furious at him, that much I remember, which didn't make me feel any better. I was filled with grief, which is one reason it sticks in my mind.

And then he came home. I could hear them talking in the living room, Mama's angry accusations and Daddy's voice, low and remorseful, I suspect. It couldn't have been terribly late, because I was still awake, and then Daddy came into my bedroom. He sat down beside me on my bed and told me how sorry he was that he had forgotten my birthday. I'm sure he told me many things, but the only thing that stands out in my memory was that now I was older, ten to be exact, and life was going to hand me some sad times as well as good ones. I was grown up enough to be able to handle that, to get used to facing trials and tribulations. I can still hear the sound of his soothing voice when I think of the memory. He didn't hurry, he took his time.

Then he put ten silver dollars on my bedstand, piled one on top of the other. In those days, silver dollars were BIG, and I remember my eyes got big, too, as I stared at what seemed to me to be a fortune! He told me that this is my birthday present: a silver dollar for each year of my life. When he left the room, I picked them up and felt them, then went to sleep with the silver dollars right on the edge of the bedstand so I could see them first thing when I awoke.

I have no memory of what I did with that money, although I'm pretty sure I spent it on trinkets. In those days, silver coins were 90% silver, and they would have been worth a great deal by now. I have never been a saver. But looking back on all my birthdays, that is the one I remember the most. Probably because of the emotional roller coaster of the day, and the happy ending. It was indeed a happy birthday after all.

And now, today, I think fondly of my parents back then, their relationship, especially their love for one another. They were married for almost forty years by the time Daddy died of a heart attack at 62. Now I'm older than he ever was, and Mama died a few months before she would have turned 70. She never stopped missing him all those years she was without him, and it gives me comfort to think of them being together again, if such a thing is what happens when we die. I won't know until it's my turn, will I? Until then, I am entitled to their imagined reunion.

As is my habit, it's still dark and my partner is sleeping lightly next to me as I write on my laptop. We didn't meet until we were both 50, but now that has been almost twenty years ago. The two of us are unlikely life partners, and I believe it is nothing short of a miracle that we met and married. As he has said before, we didn't so much meet as collide. That collision changed the way I think about life. It's so much better than I could ever have imagined.

Bulk bins and organic food

2011-11-26T19:22:00.001-08:00

When I lived in Boulder, I didn't have anything like this amazing number of bulk bins of rice and beans. This is a picture of just a few of the bulk bins available to me at the Community Food Co-op here in Bellingham. There's even bulk Forbidden (black) rice!

When we decided to move here, Smart Guy drove up in February 2008 to find us a place to live, while I finished the last few months of my job in Boulder. He told me the very first thing he did was join the Co-op and shop for some foods. We didn't know about the store when we made the decision to live in Bellingham, but it has made a huge difference in our quality of life.

During the three decades I lived in Boulder, many times a community cooperative was attempted and we always joined, but none of them ever took off. I don't really know what the difference is, but the bulk bins and presentation of foods never seemed optimal; instead they were dusty and presumably stale. At the Co-op here in Bellingham, the sheer volume of customers and turnover of produce allows me to choose from a huge variety. From the link above, on the Co-op's "Vision, Mission, Values" page, I learned that it "promotes a sustainable economy by supporting organic and sustainable food production and other environmentally and socially responsible businesses locally, regionally, and nationally." I visit the store almost every day, since it's located just behind the YMCA where I exercise four days a week.

I ride the bus from home every morning to attend my class at 9:00am. The bus in my part of town is hourly, so I arrive a few minutes after 8:00am and walk to Avellino's coffee shop for my morning latte and visit with the regulars before heading two blocks to the Y. After class, I have about a half hour to wait after I've showered and changed, until it's time to catch the bus, so I head to the Co-op and buy any little thing I might need (since I've got my recyclable bag tucked into my purse) and get a small cup of coffee. Then I make myself comfy in the cafe section of the store. I pull out my iPad, check my email and read the latest news before heading the few blocks to the bus terminal. By now I know most of the bus drivers and feel very much a part of the community. I know the other riders who use the bus at this time of day; it goes by Bellingham Technical College and there are times when the bus is very crowded, but this week when schools were closed for the holiday, I was able to chat with the driver.

Sometimes when I feel like learning more about the Co-op, I'll walk the aisles that I don't usually visit and notice what items they have (like the cereal aisle, I never buy the stuff). Almost everywhere there is a sign to remind me to "buy local" and many times a sign declaring an items "certified non-GMO." GMO stands for "genetically modified organism." Once I searched in the store for items containing HFCS (high fructose corn syrup). Even in the aisle with soft drinks (not many of them) and other drinks, I didn't find even one!

Where am I going with this post? I guess I just want to point out that I realize how fortunate I am to have such a place to shop. Not many of you have this luxury; it truly is exactly that. Sometimes I take one of the ladies who lives in my apartment complex grocery shopping (she no longer drives) to the local Albertson's store. She has shopped at this store for decades and knows the aisles and what is where. No way is she interested in changing her routine and going to the more expensive and foreign Co-op, and I never even suggest it. Just for grins while waiting for her, I will walk the aisles in the same way, looking at what foods are displayed there. No comparison, really. Just as an example, the massive aisle filled with cereals has hardly any natural cereals, they are all highly processed and filled with sugar. No wonder we have such an obesity epidemic in this country.

This week I will have my sixty-ninth birthday and begin my seventieth year. Because of my food choices, I believe that I have managed to maintain a semblance of health that eludes many people my age. Although none of us knows what the future holds, I do think that the food we put into our bodies is a choice that can assist or retard our health. A cartoon I saw recently showed a guy declaring that there are only two things that keep him from losing weight: diet and exercise.

It's still dark outside. These days the sun doesn't come up until after 7:30am and sets at 4:19pm. The wind has blown all night, bringing in a cold front after a warm and windy day yesterday. I sit here with my partner sleeping beside me, listening to the howling wind, propped up in bed with my laptop and tea. When I finish here, I'll dress and head to the Co-op to see what breakfast item they are serving today at the deli and if appropriate, I'll pick up a couple breakfasts to bring home. It's our regular wintertime Sunday morning routine. Kristin is usually behind the counter and she writes our names and a cute smiley face on the take-out boxes. I order my soy latte, pick up a Seattle Times newspaper and come home to my waiting partner. Life is pretty darn good.

My friend Robert

2011-11-20T05:16:00.001-08:00

Robert

Robert died on Friday the 13th in July 1990. I haven't thought of him very much in years - decades, even. But something happened last Sunday that has brought him into my thoughts daily since then. I met Robert when I first moved to Boulder in the mid-1970s. He and his life partner David had lived in Boulder for years and were some of the first people I became close to. It's funny how a situation can change your life, and moving into a rooming house on Boulder's university hill was the catalyst for friendships that have lasted a lifetime. The old house had maybe a dozen small rooms and a central kitchen. As I became friends with the other residents, we would gather at the kitchen table and have communal meals. That's where I met Robert, and we became immediate friends. Although he didn't live in the house, he visited often and I learned to appreciate his intellect and droll sense of humor.

I knew Robert was gay, it was hard not to know, since he was effeminate and "swishy" in his manner. I found it rather refreshing that he didn't make any fuss about it, it's just who he was. We became fast friends and he taught me a great deal about art, one of his passions. Every time he would travel out of town, I would receive an art card from him with a nice note, letting me know he was thinking about me.

At one point in my life in Boulder, I was without a place to live and moved in with David and Robert into their lovely rural home. Although I was working half-time at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, I didn't want to live alone, and the time I spent there was memorable because of Robert's touch. While there, I took a six-week leave of absence from work and went to Peru. It was a wonderful time, but apparently while eating something from a (probable) street vendor, I picked up infectious hepatitis. It didn't appear immediately because of a gamma globulin shot I had had prior to my trip, but showed up about a month after my return. Robert took me to the doctor when I woke from a terrible sleep and looked into the mirror to see that the whites of my eyes were yellow as egg yolks.

Robert nursed me back to health. I was so sick that walking up the steps from my room once a day was all I could manage. I missed another ten weeks of work and could do nothing but read and rest. I think Robert saw my situation as a perfect opportunity to teach me about some of his favorite things. He brought me book after book of art appreciation, and he introduced me to Emily Dickinson, one of his favorite poets. I became as enamored with her as he was. He fixed my meals and eventually took me for walks when I was able. It was shocking how weak and sick I was, but there is nothing for hepatitis except to rest and let your body recover. It also made me incredibly appreciative of the good friend that Robert was to me. He thought constantly of things that he hoped would make me happy and contributed a great deal to my recovery. We became even more fast friends, and he told me stories from his life that made me realize that Robert was really a woman in a man's body. He thought like me, was gentle to his very soul, and never hurt a fly.

That is what caused me to remember him so much this week. Last Sunday I went to see the opera "Tosca" by Puccini at the cinema, with English subtitles. Although I had heard the famous aria before, since Robert loved it beyond all others, I never knew the meaning of the Italian words in Vissi D'Arte (the aria), but he did. When he knew that he was dying of AIDS, Robert asked me to be in charge of his memorial service, and he was adamant about certain parts of it. At the time I lived in a basement apartment with a spacious and lovely back yard. He asked that I play that aria from "Tosca" as I slowly ascended the steps from the apartment into the yard with his ashes in an urn. It was very moving, but even more so now, more than twenty years later, when I learned the meaning of that aria sung by Tosca.

I lived for art, I lived for love,
I never did harm to a living soul!
With a secret hand
I relieved as many misfortunes as I knew of.
Ever in true faith
My prayer
Rose to the holy shrines.
Ever in true faith
I gave flowers to the altar.
In the hour of grief
Why, why, Lord,
Why do you reward me thus?
I gave jewels for the Madonna's mantle,
And songs for the stars in heaven
That shone forth with greater radiance.
In the hour of grief
Why, why, Lord,
Ah, why do you reward me thus?

When Robert was very sick, I would give him foot rubs and read to him. He would tell me what he wanted me to read, and I watched as David grew more and more distant. Sometimes when a loved one is dying, it's so difficult that one pulls away; it seemed cruel to me that David would not even sit with him. But I did, and I was happy to spend as much time with him as I could until the end. And now as I enjoy remembering him after all these years, I thank God that I was blessed with his friendship.

Robert was one of the best friends I ever had. I hope he is sitting somewhere in Heaven smiling as I write this. If he is, I'm sure he would be laughing gently and correcting any inaccuracies I've introduced. Or he would start to tell me a story, always with a moral that I might learn to be a gentle soul, too.

Remembering

2011-11-12T19:21:00.001-08:00

Diane took this picture of me on Thursday during our stop at the North Butte of Blanchard Mountain, overlooking Samish Bay. I look happy and content, don't I? Wearing my little ear cozies and gloves, I was quite warm without need for my new expensive raincoat. This week, however, I'm getting plenty of use for it, as the weather has turned blustery and very wet.

Although I was glad to go on the hike last Thursday, the date kept bothering me, since it would have been my son Chris' fiftieth birthday, if he had lived. I wasn't really as carefree as the picture makes out. It's been almost ten years now since Chris died in August 2002, and I find that anniversaries, especially big round anniversaries like fifty years, won't stop bothering me without some introspection. I sure know where I was fifty years ago. I wasn't hiking and skydiving and being surrounded by the beauty of the Pacific Northwest. I was in Puerto Rico with my first husband awaiting the birth of my first child. I wrote about that time in detail here, at the beginning of this blog when I needed to examine carefully all the pieces of my life. Today I'm trying to dispel the melancholy of the past week.

I just re-read what I wrote in that link and find that it brought it all right back into the present. I was so young and inexperienced, not even nineteen when he was born. I remember being terrified about having to experience childbirth and knowing so little about the process. There were no internet search engines, no computers to connect me to the wider world, only whispers and conjectures from one female friend to another. I lived in a ramshackle house off base surrounded by Spanish-speaking neighbors, so my only source of information was from other Air Force wives in the same situation.

The wild ride in a fellow soldier's car in the middle of the night to the Air Force Base Hospital is a dim memory, but what I remember the most was the doctors and nurses putting me onto a table and strapping my arms and legs down so I couldn't move! The first thing they did was shave my pubic area and then put an ether cone over my face. I remember trying to stop them but it was no use. The next thing I knew I had delivered my baby and he was somewhere else away from me. In those days, especially in military hospitals, the mother was considered to be a nuisance and the doctors and nurses routinely knocked out the mother so they could do the important work. Today it seems almost brutal, and the wonderful experience I had in a regular hospital with my second son makes me realize it actually wasn't done everywhere.

After I was released from the hospital and back in our home, there is a moment frozen in time when Derald and I had our arms around each other as we gazed into the crib at this miracle of life. He was lying on his stomach (which is now rare with a newborn baby) and he looked so incredibly perfect and so tiny. (He actually weighed 7 pounds 7 ounces, a healthy size, but what did I know?)

That child grew to be a big man who loved and was loved throughout his life. He was married when he died, to Silvia, a German woman he met while serving in the Army, which had become his life. The terribly painful time when I went to Bamberg Air Force Base to attend his memorial service, when I saw my son for the last time, in a coffin wearing his dress uniform... it is still painful to this day to recall that memory. But I learned how loved he was in his life, how much his fellow soldiers loved him, how much Silvia loved him, and I know he died surrounded by the same love that started his life.

And he is still loved today. Silvia still misses him, I still miss him and wonder what life would have been like for me if he had lived. All the different decisions I would have made if I had had a grandchild, if Chris was somewhere still in the world raising a family. It is a shock to realize that any child he might have had would be grown and I could be a great-grandmother without any stretch of the imagination.

No more than a hundred years ago, living to be forty years old was considered to be a complete, full life. Chris had begun to turn gray and was distressed by the fact that he was beginning to lose his hair. He struggled to keep his weight under control because he loved to eat. The Army required him to keep it down, or he would have been quite a bit heavier, I suspect.

Fifty! I remember when I turned fifty and now my son would have passed that milestone. And then on Friday of this week, the world marked Veterans' Day, or Remembrance Day, and I thought of my son and all the other members of my family who have served their country. I have nieces and nephews who are still in active service.

It all started with my parents, who met when Daddy was a young handsome soldier who saw a beautiful brown-eyed girl across the room at a party. As he made his way over to ask her to dance, the future expanded and the possibility of my existence was born. I am grateful.

Travel to Manchuria

2011-11-06T06:50:00.000-08:00

Harbin from my hotel room

In 2007, I spent an entire month in Beijing working for the Higher Education Press (HEP). Although I was also still employed by the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, I took a month's vacation in order to travel to Beijing and ascertain the level of English translation in 17 scientific journals that are published by HEP. The job was arranged for me by Qian Ye, the Chinese member of our staff, because HEP needed someone who would be willing to do this work while not expecting to be paid a great deal for it. Since I was already collecting a salary from NCAR, they paid my travel expenses and a small stipend to be spent for food. They put me up in a hotel room that was used exclusively for people working at HEP. A fairly large van picked us all up every weekday and took us into Beijing proper into their offices. Smart Guy traveled with me for the month, with us paying for his travel, and it worked out very well. But that is not what this post is about.

During that month, my NCAR boss Mickey had arranged to travel from Colorado to Harbin (in Manchuria) for an environmental conference where he would be making a presentation. He asked me to come along for five days. I took my work with me so I didn't lose any actual time in my duties for HEP. We traveled by train into Northeast China (also known as Manchuria). All travel in China, everywhere, was arranged by our Chinese handlers. There is simply no way I could have managed by myself, since I speak no Mandarin and even taxi drivers need a slip of paper or business card with my destination in order for me to travel from place to place. Taxis are incredibly cheap and available everywhere. I cannot imagine what Chinese travelers to the US think when traveling by taxi.

The name "Harbin" (as you can find from the above link) means "a place for drying fish nets" in Manchu. It is known for its incredibly harsh winters and its legacy of Russian culture. One day while there we were taken on an excursion into the city and learned some of its history. It's amazing to see buildings that bear little resemblance to what I think of as being Chinese. But then again, this is another part of China that has had many conflicts, all of which make for fascinating reading and available for further research in the link. Here's a picture of Smart Guy in front of a magnificent church in the town's center.

One notable event at the conference was that it was attended by a few students from one of the many universities, who were very interested in environmental concerns. They asked Mickey if he would be willing to make a presentation at their university. He tried to decline, since there was only the weekend before we would be leaving on Monday morning. The young earnest student said that if Mickey would agree to talk to them on Sunday morning, she would arrange it, so he agreed to meet them the very next morning at 8:00 am. Imagine his amazement when he walked into an auditorium filled to capacity with hundreds of excited students! Smart Guy went along too, and he met a young student who he still communicates with by email these days, four years later. She earned a scholarship and entrance to Baylor University in Houston and now they carry on an email conversation that covers a wide range of topics on life.

One of my blogging friends once asked me to write a bit more about the people when I visited these exotic places. And I do want to say that the Chinese people are some of the friendliest, helpful, and passionate I have ever met anywhere. Once when I was in a very crowded train terminal, a woman came over and gestured to me to cover my purse so that it would be close to my body and therefore unavailable to thieves. She must have seen me looking vulnerable and wanted to protect me. This sort of thing happened all the time and I began to take it for granted. Then once I came home to the States, I felt a sort of shock at the lack of concern we Americans seem to have for one another. Of course it didn't help that I landed in New York and had to navigate back to Colorado. Although I was never actually knocked over, I felt in danger of it, and I wondered how a Chinese person coming here sees us.

Today I don't travel around much, but it is good to have these memories of international travel. As I have said before, international travel anywhere is not as exciting as it is grueling. Although there is plenty to be said for travel in order to experience different cultures, I am glad that these days here in retirement are spent mostly at home or traveling locally to different places in my area. I am blessed to have a group that has introduced me to the wonders of the mountains and trails nearby, and with Vancouver, British Columbia less than an hour away by car, my local world still carries plenty of adventure.

During my working years, I managed to accomplish what now seems to me almost an impossibility. One thing about getting older and retiring from that world, my life is now filled with numerous activities that are fulfilling and chosen by me. The pace is slower now, which is appropriate, and it all evolved in small incremental steps, so I never actually noticed. It's good to have a chance to look back and look ahead at what still beckons in my day-to-day life.

Head cold, chin hairs, and wheat

2011-10-30T06:56:00.000-07:00

This week, when Al took this picture of me and Mt. Baker, I was on top of the world. I felt great as we hiked in the sunshine and fresh snow. That was Tuesday, and then on Thursday we hiked again in the sunshine. The two trips in the High Country totaled more than sixteen miles and 5,500 feet up and down.

However, on Thursday morning when I woke up to get ready for the hike, I wondered if it was my imagination or did I have just the slightest bit of a sore throat? I decided to ignore it and went anyway. While we were on the trail, I didn't feel sick at all, but in the car during the ride home (more than an hour), I began to sneeze. Fortunately I carry a hankie so the other people in the car didn't get sprayed. By the time I reached home, my head was stuffed up and I couldn't stop sneezing. Not to mention that I felt miserable. I went to bed around 7:00pm and continue to sneeze. I had some homeopathic Zicam in the closet and took it, along with some Nyquil and managed to get a halfway decent night's sleep, although I had to breathe most of the night through my mouth. I hate that. I was up and reading my blogs before 5:00am.

On Friday I noticed that my nasal voice and red nose were the least of my worries, as I felt like crap. So much for getting in one last day of skydiving on Saturday before the season ends. Nobody jumps with a head cold. I did once long ago and thought my eardrums were going to rupture when I opened my parachute after a minute of freefall. This didn't improve my mood one bit. As I looked in the bathroom mirror while I brushed my teeth, the sick grumpy visage that stared back at me was sprouting chin hairs! That did it, I got out the tweezers and went to work.

Years ago, I remembered watching my mother do the same thing and I laughed at her. This was in my hippie days when I dressed "naturally" and wore Birkenstocks. I told her that if the same thing happened to ME, I'd wear my chin hairs proudly. As I looked in the mirror at myself I couldn't help but smile, plucking out the hairs with the same tweezers she used all those years ago. Sometimes I am embarrassed when confronted with my own arrogance.

I am not a good patient. I don't know how to be sick and wonder how I would fare with a chronic illness. Some of my blogging friends give me plenty of inspiration as they deal with myriad trials and tribulations with humor and courage. My life has changed plenty because of my blogging. The friends who greet me every morning when I read their blogs have given me more than a new perspective; sometimes one of you will give me a new direction to follow.

Last week Technobabe suggested that I read a book called Wheat Belly to discover what she and her husband feel has changed their lives for the better. In fact, her husband James, a musician, wrote a wonderful song about it which is in that link to her blog. I did indeed read the book, and my dear Smart Guy and I have decided to do a month-long test to see how we fare without wheat. The author, William Davis, is a cardiologist who has discovered that today's wheat has been hybridized and changed to such an extent that it causes many illnesses in his patients that can be treated without drugs -- by removing wheat from their diets.

Dr. Davis goes on to suggest that anyone who is diabetic or prediabetic should get rid of all gluten and severely restrict carbohydrates, but we aren't going that far yet, keeping rye bread without added sugar, beans, and occasional brown rice in our vegetarian diets. Well, we are not actually vegetarians since we eat fish. I remember learning that vegetarians who eat fish are called "pescatarians." That's us. Who would move to the Pacific Northwest and not take advantage of the local fantastic salmon? We are less than a week into our quest and decided also to eliminate all added sugars such as honey. I don't eat a lot of wheat in the first place, but I am a fan of locally baked spelt bread. I found that it's got a pretty heavy glycemic load so I've replaced it with pumpernickel, which is actually really good too.

I went to bed Saturday night not feeling very well, but I was able to sleep for almost twelve hours and woke feeling like a new person. Usually on Saturdays I take an early morning walk of five or six brisk miles with the Fairhaven Walkers and then swim a half mile, but I decided not to push it and forego (forewent?) those activities. Instead I went to the Farmers' Market to pick up some collards and kale, two of my favorite vegetables, as well as some absolutely delicious delicata squash. I am fortunate to have organic veggies and fresh-caught wild salmon to enjoy. It would be hard living somewhere that doesn't offer the variety we have here and attempt to eliminate wheat. It's in so many processed foods!

The one big difference I've noticed already is that I am not hungry in between meals. I'm definitely eating less, but that could be a function of having a cold. I'll know more by next Sunday and will let you know how it's going. It does make me hopeful that perhaps I won't gain back my hard-won weight loss of the past nine months by going wheat-free. The winter months when I don't get out as often are hard for me to deal with; exercising in the rain isn't my favorite activity.

Sitting here in the dark before dawn drinking my tea, pouring out these words on my laptop, I realize that I'm over the hump and will now be getting better each day. One thing about feeling so awful for a few days is that when health begins to return, everything around me begins to look brighter.

Genetics and numbers

2011-10-23T06:38:00.000-07:00

The Sixlings, March 2011

I was going to write more about travels in China, but that's not what I've been thinking about this week, so here it is: numbers. Cholesterol and lipid numbers, to be exact. Our parents are possibly at fault, but I've simply got to find out how to get my cholesterol under control. This is a picture of my siblings, with me as the oldest on the left, then Norma Jean, PJ, my only brother Buz, and baby sisters Markee and Fia. (Baby Markee just turned fifty.)

Last week Norma Jean had gone to get her cholesterol checked and was disappointed with the results. Both of us had read a book positing that higher doses of vitamin C and lysine would help to lower these numbers (along with good diet, of course) and we both began a regimen that we hoped was the answer to the genetic predisposition our parents gave us. Since both my mother and father didn't have statins available to them, they both had high cholesterol when they died (very high, in the 400-500 range) and heart disease is rampant in our family. Every single one of the six of us are on statins for high cholesterol.

Back in January when I went to the doctor's office and found that my cholesterol was elevated (total 246), I decided to go on a diet to lose the ten pounds I had gained since the previous checkup. I was very successful, losing fifteen pounds, to be exact, and feeling better than I have in years. I get more exercise than many seniors, I'd say, and on Thursday I went to see my doctor, confident that my numbers would have improved. Friday I had my blood drawn while fasting.

Thanks to the miracle of the PeaceHealth online connection, that very afternoon I got an email saying that my test results were available, and I pulled up the page with confidence — and was crushed when I saw the numbers. Total cholesterol is UP to 259, with my good cholesterol (HDLs) have dropped from 77 to 65. That's still good, of course, but I've been exercising more this past summer than I have in years, having added swimming and getting in extra hikes with the Senior Trailblazers. And to top it off, my triglycerides have doubled from 79 to 141! I don't eat ANY simple carbohydrates and that just floored me. Granted, I had never had such low triglycerides before, as they usually run right around 100.

So, color me disappointed too. I spent Friday night waking up, tossing and turning and wondering what I have been doing wrong. The doctor's notation was also on the test results, and I saw that he will be suggesting to me that I double my dose of simvastatin (Zocor) from 20 to 40. He wrote that I should just take two tablets instead of one every evening until they are gone, and then he'll give me a prescription. He hasn't called me yet, then again that was just two days ago, but I immediately began to take two and will have my blood drawn again in three months to see how I'm tolerating the higher dose.

Genetics is probably the reason for all these numbers being elevated, but I remembered that years ago I decided to try the Dean Ornish diet for heart disease. He wrote a book in 1992 called Dr. Dean Ornish's Program for Reversing Heart Disease and I jumped on the bandwagon, following everything to the letter. The short version of the diet is to limit simple carbohydrates completely, concentrating on complex carbs, with small amounts of protein and fat. I lost weight then, too, but when I had my blood drawn, my numbers were sky high, and I was twenty years younger, too. My doctor at the time told me that some people have a strong genetic predisposition to what she called "hyperlipidemia" and that statins would lower my numbers, and she was right. So I'm now doubling my statin drugs and hoping for the best.

The actual diet that helped me the most is the South Beach diet, which is what I follow pretty closely. The way I lost the weight I had gained last year is to start to count my calorie intake, as I had gotten more and more cavalier about portion size and the weight just crept up. I knew I had stashed my favorite pants had in the back of my closet since they no longer fit, but I figured it was simple aging. I'm proudly wearing them again, though, and I'd like to keep the weight from coming back.

My genetics is probably the reason I've got these numbers, but I will never stop trying to find a natural way to lower them. I feel stronger and better with the vitamin C and lysine, so I'll keep on doing that, but striving to find the diet that will keep these numbers all within normal parameters without drugs... maybe it's possible. So far, the statins are my only hope to avoid heart disease.

Travels in Western China

2011-10-16T06:43:00.000-07:00

Xinjiang Province, Western China

I just wasn't sure what to write about this morning, since nothing special has been on my mind this past week, and one of the blogs I read this morning discussed how in her job as a public servant, everybody complains about everything in this country. She speculated about whether we should just go back to living without government in our lives. This reminded me of my travels in Western China, where things are very, very different from what I experience in my own country.

The sign behind these ladies is in Arabic, Chinese, and perhaps another language I don't recognize right off. The two ladies in front are sitting down for lunch. The people behind the tables are serving them, with face masks for cleanliness, but you might notice, no gloves of any kind. Since the thin woman in front is not wearing a head scarf, she is probably Chinese while the others are Uyghurs. If you aren't aware of the conflicts going on in this part of China, it's because the Chinese don't allow you to know. I fully expect that one day, perhaps during my lifetime, the Uyghurs will rise up against the Han Chinese. They don't call themselves Chinese, but of course the Chinese government says they are. For more information about this part of the world, you can read about it here (Wikipedia of course).

I was there for a week while we held an international conference in the capital city of Urumqi. Because we had our evenings and the weekend free, we were taken on excursions to other parts of the area so we could appreciate the sights. The market where you see these women was actually considered to be off limits to us, but my old boss Mickey never let something like that stop him. However, I did notice that we were scrutinized by several people and I got the strong feeling that our presence was not welcome. Certainly my camera was not. But when I had the chance to interact with any of the people, they were kind and inquisitive. The language barrier was huge. Although you might hear that the Chinese people study English for years in school, they are never exposed to it. This sign might give you an idea of what I'm talking about.

The picture was actually taken in a train station on the other side of China, Harbin. I'll talk about my travels there in another post, but I didn't get a picture in Xinjiang Province that shows so perfectly how vastly different our languages are. The translation must have been done by an official, and that's as good as it got. Back to Xinjiang Province.

I was actually able to visit there twice, since we held two conferences at the university in Urumqi. Perhaps five years separated the first visit from the last, and the tension in the countryside was even stronger. We were last there in 2003, and in July 2009, there were riots in the city. When I read about the situation, I could picture the people and knew that it was inevitable. The Chinese government executed many Uyghurs who were suspected of being involved, but there's no way to know for sure. In China, there is no such thing as a real trial. Within a week of being accused, these people were executed by the government. I was appalled and wondered how many of these men were innocent of anything other than having been born Uyghurs.

There are many things that could be improved in my own country, but when I visit a place like Xinjiang Province and come back home, I am always struck by two things: one, I can say what I please and nobody is going to come to my home and arrest me; and two, my government provides me with many things, such as libraries, roads, and food safety standards, which I take for granted until they are suddenly not there.

As is true everywhere, our home has a special place in our hearts, because we know it so well. I am sure that many of the people in Xinjiang Province feel the same way. They showed me many kindnesses and were curious and inquisitive about my own way of life. I wish them all well. Given the chance to visit there again, I don't think I would go, because the tensions can only grow, as much as the Chinese government might want them to go away.

Creative writing

2011-10-09T06:00:00.000-07:00

I snapped this picture of one my chickadee friends yesterday morning through the front window. They are my favorite birds, since they seem to recognize me and spend time "talking" to me when I'm on the porch filling the feeders. I wish I could speak bird.

The past week or so I've been thinking about what it means to write creatively. Years ago I took a class in creative writing and learned some techniques that I still use today when thinking about a blog post. And several times people have suggested to me that I consider writing a book of some kind, maybe even memoirs if nothing else. It's true that my life is pretty unique, but then again, whose life isn't?

One of the things that the teacher of that long-ago class taught me is that if you do want to become a writer, then you should write something every day. Practice makes perfect. She would start each day by sitting at her desk and answering correspondence to get herself in the writing mood, and then she'd start back at one of several different projects she had going all at the same time, depending on what interested her that day. I have found in my own life that I do enjoy writing, but I don't have much knack for fiction stories. I did write several for the class and she even read a couple of them out loud. (I wonder if I've got those old stories tucked away somewhere.) The class would then critique them, what they liked and didn't like, and that was also very informative. Some people have a real gift for writing dialogue, but I find it almost impossible to make it believable. We also learned the basics of a good story.

One tip I remember is that in any story, the first sentence or two should grab the reader's attention. I have forgotten that in blog posts— but then again, I figure if you are here reading, you are already interested. Visiting other blogs often feels like stopping by a friend's house and having a chat over a cup of tea. Being enticed inside isn't even a question.

What I've decided is that I actually prefer the form of blogging rather than the creation of a static book or story. In my life these days, I realize that the first thing I do every day is make a cup of tea and open my laptop, while my partner sleeps next to me. (He isn't bothered by the click of the keyboard or the low light next to me; he sleeps right through it.) It's still dark outside and I learn what has happened in the lives of the people I follow since my last visit. Sometimes it's fluff, or pictures of their day, or a soliloquy of inward thoughts. Or something that happened that concerns them, such as political theater or economics, or books... it's really endless, but it gives my day a certain flavor, and I can comment immediately and sometimes get instant feedback by receiving a private email from someone who might respond privately to my comment.

As a very social person, I realize that this sets the stage for the rest of my day, and sometimes one post will strike me deeply. I will contemplate it, turning it over in my mind, and find myself traveling in mental directions that would never have occurred to me otherwise. I am a different person because I read and write blogs. Oh, and comment on them, too; that's an important part of the experience. I know some people by the consistency of their comments on my own posts, and they must feel the same way about me. It's just common courtesy to comment on posts you appreciate, but it's also important to the creator of the post to know how it is being received.

The instantaneous world of the blogosphere is, as I've said before, a new art form in the world. I'm feeling privileged to be part of it. Creative writing? I read it every day. And some days, I produce it for the pleasure of others. Or to stir something that needs stirring.

October sunrise

2011-10-02T06:10:00.000-07:00

This sunrise picture was taken from my front porch last Friday, so it wasn't exactly an October sunrise, since it was taken the last day of September. Close enough. I remembered that old phrase about "red sky at morning, sailors take warning; red sky at night, sailors delight." I went to Google to find out where that phrase came from and found many sources, one even from the Bible (Matthew 16:2-3). It is an interesting read. A quote from that link:

If the morning skies are red, it is because clear skies to the east permit the sun to light the undersides of moisture-bearing clouds coming in from the west. Conversely, in order to see red clouds in the evening, sunlight must have a clear path from the west in order to illuminate moisture-bearing clouds moving off to the east.

This past week has been filled with introspection, probably because of the change in seasons and the constant monitoring of the weekend weather to decide if I can get another day of skydiving in before the weather closes that avenue until spring. In Boulder, I could jump all year round, but here, it is entirely seasonal because of the low clouds and rain that accompany us during the fall and winter months. I really don't mind. If I still lived in Boulder, I would probably make many more jumps but be unable to extricate myself long enough to find out what other activities I might want to explore.

I am much more active since I moved to Bellingham and discovered my hiking group. Last Thursday we had an absolutely beautiful blue-sky day. We went to the Baker Lake area to climb up to a lookout cabin in order to take in the glorious 360-degree views. When we were there two weeks ago, the area was socked in with fog and rain.

Before I began jumping in late 1990, I was an avid backcountry skier and climbed many of the fourteeners in Colorado. All that fell by the wayside once I discovered the thrill of skydiving. The friends I had known for decades grew weary of me telling them about it and gradually I only hung out with fellow skydivers. It's that kind of sport for many -- not everybody, though. I would wake up on a weekend morning and dash to the window to see if it looked at all possible to skydive. I'd jump in my car and drive fifty minutes to the Drop Zone if there was any possibility at all, since I was afraid my friends would be there having the time of their life, and I would be missing out!

But my Smart Guy once told me that it's not possible to have a hundred jumps forever, if you keep skydiving. And he is right. With more than four thousand now, the thrill I had back then is gone, but the habit and excitement of the familiar feeling of freefall keep me coming back. I also enjoy the friends I've made at the Snohomish Drop Zone and look forward to the feeling of simple play I have when I'm with them.

There is no natural physical cutoff time to stop skydiving. It's more a sense of when your body no longer can do all that packing and hanging on the outside of airplanes and flying your canopy to the ground once you open it. I have an acquaintance in California who I've jumped with over the years who is turning eighty next month. He plans to attempt to make eighty jumps that day, with the help of a whole bunch of friends, two airplanes, and lots of support staff. But he's in incredible shape and jumps in California year round. I don't have any desire to try such a thing, since my focus is turning away from skydiving into the next phase of life.

The same day that I took that picture, I happened to run into at least six different people on the street who I have met in various ways here in Bellingham. As I was walking back to the bus to head home, a feeling of belonging right here, right now, caused my heart to swell with happiness. This is where I was headed when I left Boulder, looking for a new home. I've found it, and everything is in its proper place.

Our changing world

2011-09-25T06:42:00.000-07:00

Me in 1943

When this little girl was little, the world was a very different place. More than I can sometimes fathom. My dad took this picture, and it was translated from a color slide into a digital print by Pete, Norma Jean's husband of 44 years. Daddy has been gone since 1979, and Pete died this past spring. The little girl is now a senior. Although the toddler doesn't exist any more, I am still here, in a world no one alive back then would recognize, if they somehow had a chance to visit.

Probably the biggest changes can be traced to two sources, the first being the number of people on the planet today, versus when the picture was taken: more than three times as many. Before the current year ends, the world will have seven billion human inhabitants. I found this graph on Wikipedia:

What this tells me is that there is no way the world could have added this many people without massive changes in the way everything is distributed. In this country, it means that the rich have become richer and the poor are much poorer. Income distribution makes everything different. And then there is food. Of the seven billion on the planet right now, one-sixth of them are hungry, and more than six million children die of malnutrition every year (2010 statistics).

When that picture was taken, I would bet that many adults believed that, with the wealth of the world today, hunger would be a thing of the past. I know I did when I was growing up. But who could have guessed then at how much greed and avarice would run things? Certainly not me. I truly believed that our better nature would prevail.

The other big change in our world has been caused by the huge advances in technology. Without even thinking about it, I googled the web to find the statistics and graph I used in this post, and without a thought of the amazing nature of this, I have at my fingertips all the facts and figures anybody could wish for. Kids born today don't know a world without cellphones and instant messaging; they know how to "keyboard" before they can talk. Yesterday, Leo at my local coffeeshop begged me to take out my iPad so he could look at pictures. He swiped his finger across the screen confidently to change from one picture to the next. He's not even three years old yet. What will the world be like when he's my age?

This has been on my mind lately, since I've been mulling over the creation of an "epitaph" post: one I write and give to my Life Partner so that, in case of me expiring suddenly or unexpectedly, all my followers will not be left to wonder what happened to me. Somebody gave me the idea of writing this as a sort of Living Will for my two blogs. If you have ever tried to think of what you would write in this situation, trust me: it's quite a useful meditation. I have only just begun the process, and it may take me a while, but I will have written it all out one of these days. And in the process, I'll learn something.

Years ago, when I was a Hospice volunteer, we were given a similar exercise: to give a memorial statement about my life at my own funeral. I remember doing it, and somewhere in my things I believe I still have it. I'll try to dig it up and see what I said back in the 1980s about who I thought I would be by the time I died. At that place in life, I didn't know Smart Guy, hadn't started skydiving, and Chris was alive and well. So I suspect it would be quite different from what I will write these days. I'll let you know how it goes.

Hopefully this post will not be depressing, but it's what is on my mind as I sit here in the dark, listening to the wind and rain blustering outside. Every once in a while a gentle breeze blowing through the window caresses my face. The state of the world might be scary in the aggregate, but right here right now, it feels just right.

The end of summer

2011-09-18T06:58:00.000-07:00

Late snowfall brought spring flowers in September

This year, 2011, has been one for the record books in so many ways. Here in the Northern Hemisphere, summer comes to an end this week, and we only really had two weeks of warm weather in my part of the country. Other parts, like Texas, had nonstop 100-degree days; I'll take our version of summer any time. I'm listening to the rain falling outside right now, reconciled to the fact that skydiving this weekend won't happen and hoping the next weekend will bring warmer and drier weather.

The springtime brought us so much snow and cool weather that we were sure that come July our summer would start. It didn't. Then August came, and it started out cool and rainy. It wasn't until September that it began to be really warm. I enjoy Scott Sistek's weather blog on KOMO News, and he wrote here about how we had six consecutive months of below-normal temperatures.

The late snowfall in the mountains and the cool temperatures meant that snow would cover most of the trails in the Mt. Baker wilderness that I enjoy every summer. This year we couldn't even get to the trailheads of most of them, and I just learned that the snow level is lowering to 6,000 feet this week, meaning that the remaining snow will not clear, only to be covered by more. I wonder what the bears have been eating to get ready for their long hibernation.

The upside has been the wildflowers this year. They have been everywhere in amazing profusion at the higher elevations, when usually they are long gone by this time. Tomorrow we'll go on another hike in the mountains, and I suspect I'll see more flowers. They thrill me when they are in such abundance, especially when the sun is shining. Tomorrow's hike will be the seventh extra hike we added that takes us to new places farther south, since so many of our usual treks are impassable. It's supposed to be hard, one of the hardest I'll have done, but the rain should have stopped by then.

I'm in the best shape I've been in for decades. Because of the extra hikes on Mondays on top of the regular Thursday hikes, I noticed this past Thursday that a 1,700-foot elevation gain over three miles felt like nothing. Tomorrow's 4,000-foot elevation gain on Mount Dickerman wil be a challenge, I'm sure, but it comes at the best possible time for me. Although the summer is coming to an end, and my ability to keep this hard-won fitness will probably not last for the entire winter, I'll do my best to help it along. At my age, the adage "use it or lose it" applies to many aspects of life, but especially to fitness.

Interesting to me to consider how hard it is to become fit and how easy it is to lose it. It's not fair, but there you go. Nothing to be done about that fact. At any age, getting in shape is a worthwhile goal, but when your seventies are looming on the horizon, it's very satisfying to walk for long distances and feel my body continue to perform admirably. It's not that I don't get tired, but a good night's sleep or two and good healthy food and I'm raring to go again. I haven't felt this strong and vigorous in a long, long time.

I know I will be writing in here soon enough about my aches and pains, I've done it plenty in the past, but today, it's the other side of the equation I'm feeling. At the end of summer 2011, I can look back at the past season and be grateful for it. The rain is pattering gently on the roof, a light breeze wafts in through the window as I sit in the darkness, my tea finished and the day just beginning.

Ten years ago

2011-09-11T06:21:00.000-07:00

Another anniversary that brings back memories of the day ten years ago that the Twin Towers were destroyed. I have read many remembrances from that day, but the ones that have moved me the most are first-hand accounts of what each person was doing at the time.

My day started with me getting ready to go into the office for a two-day-long evaluation of our department's work during the previous five years and the direction we were planning to follow for the next five years. At the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), each section would go through this on a rotating basis and it was our turn. Scientists who made up several panels had arrived during the previous weekend from both coasts. NCAR is located in Boulder, Colorado. We had prepared for this day for months.

It was during the first break that we heard, and one of our administrators had a small television on her desk. We all came in and crowded around while we watched in horror as they played, over and over, the planes hitting the Twin Towers. Although it was difficult, we tried to carry on with the planned events until the first Tower fell, and then it was all canceled. At home that afternoon, I remember so well the tears flowing as Smart Guy and I held hands in silence watching the events of the day. None of our visiting scientific staff were able to return home since all air traffic had been shut down. Everything was in disarray.

Tragedy sometimes sucks me in and I try to absorb it a little at a time, but these events were so huge and all-encompassing that I spent the next days in mourning, along with the rest of the world. I didn't feel scared for my own safety but filled with sadness for all those who had lost their lives in the event, and the terrible wreckage left behind. I remember hoping that they would find survivors in the wreckage, which they didn't. Not even one person. When they showed a special filled with images of those people who jumped off the Towers, it hit me hard. I can still see those images in my mind's eye, and to this day I cannot shut them out.

A few months later, I traveled to New York for a conference and saw the lights shining in the darkness where the Twin Towers had stood. It was impossible to get close to Ground Zero, I didn't even try, but everywhere we went in the evenings, we could see those lights shining up to heaven. The world had changed, but we didn't really know how or why.

My son Chris was stationed in Germany and he was involved in protecting his Army base from possible attack. I heard much later, when I visited the base for his funeral, that he had stayed up all night and performed magnificently in stressful circumstances. Then we went to war with the Taliban in Afghanistan. I was filled with worry for his safety. He told me not to worry, someone had to sort the mail. However, less than a year later, Chris would be gone, and not long after that, the United States would be at war with Iraq. I had a hard time trying to understand why we were going after that country.

And today we are still at war, ten years later. Can anybody tell me why? All those people dead and more every day. I still remember the awful feeling in the pit of my stomach when I heard we were starting another war in Iraq. Oh, the country I love: what has happened to us? Have we lost our way in the fog of war?

I can only hope that the world's wounds will heal once we stop blowing things up in the name of revenge. Or something. I am too small a person to understand the sweep of history during the passage of events, but I do hope I live long enough to see peace and prosperity return to my little corner of the world. Today I will be thinking of that event ten years ago that started us down this long journey and seeking solace in friendship. It is all I know how to do.

Peruvian adventure

2011-09-04T06:14:00.000-07:00

I took this picture at Machu Picchu thirty years ago. The way the stones were carved into this little niche fascinated me. But now, what fascinates me even more is that thirty years have passed since I was there. My first international adventure was in the fall of 1981. Now it's the fall of 2011.

On the first day of summer in 1981, I was hit by a truck from behind while riding my bicycle down Boulder Canyon, which I wrote about here. I sustained a compression fracture in my back, which turned out to be rather fortuitous in many ways: the last thoracic vertebrae is not involved in weight bearing for the upper or lower body, so after healing up from the injury, I received a small settlement from the driver's insurance company ($10,000). Most of my friends at the time thought I should invest the money (which would have been the sensible thing to do), but I decided I wanted to travel to Peru. After arranging for a six-week-long absence from my job, I took off for Peru. One thing I wanted to see was Machu Picchu, and a tattered poster of the ruins had followed me from one apartment to the next. It embodied my dream of travel to distant places.

My traveling companion, Marla, was unknown to me before some well-meaning friends hooked us up. Those same friends didn't like the idea of me traveling alone, which I was prepared to do, but Marla and I were such different people that we only spent a small portion of our time in Peru together. We did, however, both meet up again for a five-day excursion from Cuzco to Machu Picchu. We took the train from Cuzco to Kilometer 88, where about a dozen fellow hikers from all over the world disembarked along with us for a three-day-long hike across three mountain passes on the ancient Inca Trail. I found a description of the hike on line and learned that now the Peruvian Government does not allow anyone to take this trip without a guide. Thirty years ago the trail was open to anyone who wanted to take it.

We carried a tent and iodine pills to treat whatever water we might find. After those three days of hiking, we crested a hill and looked down on Machu Picchu, with Huayna Picchu (the big mountain behind the ruins) resplendent in all its glory. This picture was taken from Wikipedia, but I have a similar one somewhere.

When we arrived early in the morning, there were only a few fellow hikers there, but as the day went on, busload after busload of tourists arrived from Cuzco so they could walk around the ruins and then be transported back to town. I climbed to the top of Huayna Picchu after touring through the ruins. I felt that the bused tourists' experience of the place could not be anywhere like mine, since I had actually WALKED there.

I don't even remember what kind of camera I had with me, but of course it had film back then and I didn't see my pictures until I arrived back home in Boulder. Funny, now that seems so strange since I'm used to seeing my pictures instantaneously. Life has changed a great deal, in ways that no one could have predicted. But one that is the same today, I'm still hiking.

Thirty years is a long time. I was in my late thirties when I took this journey to Peru, and I've now experienced the culture of many more countries and had numerous adventures. But this was my first, and I will never forget how it shaped me. You never forget your first time.

I am getting older

2011-08-28T06:23:00.000-07:00

This picture of me, taken last week by Fred while we were on our hike to Goat Lake, shows a nice smiling lady standing in front of a beautiful scene. But something about the lovely picture nagged at me and I just couldn't figure it out at first. Then it hit me: I am getting older, and no matter how much I exercise and diet, time doesn't stand still for anybody, and it shows. The three pictures I keep in the header of this blog show a progression of aging, and it hasn't stopped or slowed down at all. This is natural and inevitable, but every once in a while, I notice and think about where I'm headed.

The world has changed so much since I was born almost seven decades ago. Even though birth and death are major events to an individual, they continue to occur all over the world at every moment, not just with humanity but with everything. It's usually so gradual that we don't notice, but if I think of the world as it was when I was young and compare it to the world I live in today, the differences are staggering. The population of the United States has more than doubled. How could that not be noticeable? But it also has happened gradually and although I realize how many more people are around, I always think that it is simply where I am living, and that somewhere the world exists as it did when I was little. But it's just not true. It's gone. The Wizard of Oz was made in 1939, and we still watch it occasionally on TV. Every single person, from stage hand to Munchkin to actor, has died. There was no massive catastrophe that caused this, just the simple passage of time.

The world doesn't stand still for anybody or anything. The wrinkled and spotted hands that type this today were once pretty, with manicured and painted nails, and I cared a great deal how they looked. That has also gone; today they function just fine, and I cannot imagine putting polish on my nails ever again. It just doesn't have the importance it once did. But today I notice, marking another change that happened while I wasn't paying attention.

If I could see a map of the United States with a light winking on at every birth, and a light winking off at every death, I might notice an upward trend. More people are being born than are dying in this part of the world, and this not only changes the quality of each life, but the sheer numbers cause me to realize that it cannot continue at this rate for much longer. There are more than 312 million of us in the US today, and when I was born, it was around 140 million. And even though I'm old now, it's taken less than seventy years for this enormous change to occur. The demographics are fascinating to me, and if you are interested, take a look for yourself. This is just in my small corner of the world; it's happening everywhere. I remember when I was in school learning about the fact that the world population would reach 6 billion by the turn of the century. At the time, this represented a doubling of the 3 billion on the planet. I couldn't even begin to imagine how different life would be, but the gradual rate of change has made it noticeable but not incredibly so. Certainly nothing like I imagined.

The other side of the passage of time has been the incredible rate of change in connectivity. I'm sitting here with a laptop that is connected to the world in ways that I could never have imagined even a decade ago. Yesterday I video chatted with my sister on Skype; this morning I've googled several items to check facts or download a picture, and I am writing this article on a blog that will appear on your own computer instantly after I hit "publish." If you try to imagine how that sentence would have puzzled someone who tried to make sense of it just a few short years ago: what's a Google? Skype? Blog?

It all seems so natural to me. I can hardly imagine how different my life would be without my connections. Smart Guy and I each have a cellphone and can talk to each other while out walking or while driving somewhere (although here in Washington state, I now pull over if the phone rings so I don't get a ticket). But how cool is that? And the best part is that I can TURN IT OFF if I feel like it. I remember how annoyed I would get when I would receive a phone call when I wasn't feeling receptive. All these changes have come in the past few years, too. We don't even have a landline any more.

Thinking about the passage of time, of the inevitability of change, I feel a little like I'm standing on the edge of a cliff looking down into a beautiful valley. I realize that as I can see everything from this vantage point, I can also feel the breeze lifting my hair and the rush of exhilaration that comes from having climbed this high.

Whatever comes

2011-08-21T06:03:00.000-07:00

I took this picture last Thursday while we Trailblazers were on our hike up Welcome Pass, which I wrote about on my other blog here. It was a beautiful day and a very hard hike; my legs have still not recovered and it's Sunday morning already. But it was totally worth it for the views and the wildflowers.

Last night I tossed and turned and wondered what I would write about this morning. The past few posts have been on the painful side, and the only thing I really hope turns out from this stream of consciousness attempt (hence the title "whatever comes") is that is be uplifting. I'm weary of looking at the past and wondering how I got here. Where is "here," anyway?

I'm reading an interesting book by Henry Alford, "How to Live: A Search for Wisdom from Old People." The inside cover has teasers like "Part family memoir, part Studs Terkel, How to Live is more than just a compendium of sage advice; it is a celebration of living well." So far (I'm on page 61), I'd say that is pretty accurate. Lots of food for thought. Maybe that's one reason why I'm feeling introspective without old memories crowding into my brain.

Alford peered into the philosophies of some old sages: Confucius (551 B.C.—479 B.C.), Buddha (563 B.C.—483 B.C.), and Socrates (470 B.C.—399 B.C.). For some reason I noticed that all three of these sages were right around 70 years old when they died, and I'm getting right up there with what has for so long been considered a full, complete life. What wisdom have I come up with? Not that I put myself into the same category as these old sages, but heck, who's to say I can't come up with some modern equivalent? For one thing, we in the modern age have unprecedented access to so much information, not to mention a new paradigm for communication: the blogosphere, which allows me to ruminate and share my thoughts, with instant feedback and unlimited possibilities. I have at this moment 78 followers, which means, if we were in a room together, it would have to be a big one. I picture the virtual classroom where we are gathered, with ideas and warm sentiments being shared. Lots of virtual hugs, too. This scene makes me smile just to think of it.

Last night I went to see "The Help," a movie adapted from a novel I read recently. Scenes from that movie kept coming up to me during my nighttime tossing. Viola Davis is magnificent as Aibileen, one of the main characters. The film adaptation is every bit as good as the book, to me, but something about the movie kept nagging at me. The theater was crowded, and people laughed and applauded at parts they liked, which always changes my experience, causing me to get caught up in the shared experience. After reading the reviews, I was able to put my finger on the same nagging discomfort that I felt from the book as well: somehow the interpretation of black maids in 1960s-era Jackson, Mississippi, flattened the historical era into larger-than-life villains and heroines. I lived through that time, too; it was a time like no other, but it was very complex. This is not to say I didn't like the book or the movie. Both were very worthwhile, and I wonder what other people think.

After all, I'm here in this new era: the crowded room where we share with one another gives me access to the wisdom and insight of all of you. I'm sitting here in the still-dark morning, laptop and cup of tea at hand, thinking large thoughts and smiling to myself. Today I'll get up and head down to Snohomish to jump out of airplanes with my friends (hopefully), come home tired and renewed, and check my email to find out how this stream of consciousness blog went over with you.

Anniversaries

2011-08-14T06:44:00.000-07:00

Tomorrow is the ninth anniversary of my son Chris' death. August 15 is also the day in 1964 when my second son, Stephen, was born. Time has a way of helping one to forget the joy and pain we experienced in the past. Sometimes nine years seems a long time ago, and sometimes it seems much more recent. The remains of both of my sons lie in separate graves somewhere, but I wouldn't visit them, even if I could. Stephen in Flint, Michigan, and Chris in Bamberg, Germany. To me, graveyards don't contain the important part of a person's remains.

Somebody else made the decision in each case to bury them. I myself will have my body cremated and leave nothing but ashes behind, hopefully to be scattered in some beautiful place. But it won't matter much to me in any event. It's those of us left behind that it matters to. Silvia, Chris' wife, wanted him buried in her cemetery so she could visit him, and that's fine. Everyone has different ways to commemorate those who have passed on before us.

When Chris died in 2002, I remember waking up that morning and thinking it was a special day somehow, but I didn't remember why, at first. By the time the day was over, and I was making arrangements to travel to Germany, I remembered that it was also Stephen's birthday and I had forgotten. Today the anniversary of those events does not escape my notice. But I didn't set out this morning to grieve, but to celebrate the full life my son Chris had accomplished by the time he had turned forty.

People die prematurely all the time, and in the old days, forty was not so premature. Chris had lots of gray in his hair and although he had not produced any children, it was not for want of trying. I think he really would have been a good father; he was very close to his stepson, Silvia's son from a previous marriage. I am not close to him and only met him during my stay in Bamberg for Chris' memorial service. Silvia is German and her English at the best of times is not good. We are Facebook friends and that is enough for me these days.

Chris worked in the mail room on the Army base and so many people told me of his generous spirit and quick laughter. I remember when he was a young boy that he was fiercely independent. When I would read to him, it was for me and not for him, since he would allow me to read to him but didn't care if I did or not. And forget hugs and kisses! But we would share many things and I remember laughing together at things long forgotten. But I still remember the affection and laughter.

He was a pretty good student. That changed as he grew older and lost interest in academics, but I am grateful that he never experienced the kind of bullying that seems rampant in elementary schools today. Although he was influenced by his peers and took up drugs in high school, it was his habit of smoking that I believe killed him. He tried so many times to quit, and finally managed to give up cigarettes completely a few months before he died. He was so proud of his accomplishment and we emailed back and forth about his struggles and progress.

He had been given a three-month temporary assignment in Macedonia, and he was away from his wife and stepson when he died. His roommate in their quarters told me of Chris' enjoyment of coming into the air-conditioned comfort of his room after a hot day outside, when he would quaff a beer and sit in his skivvies, making everybody laugh at his satisfaction of a job well done, the day's work finished.

Chris would call me twice a year, on his birthday and on Mother's Day. He would tell me of his latest trials and tribulations, but he seemed really happy most of the time, and that was confirmed when I went to Germany. He was not only well liked by his friends and loved by his family, but he loved the Army, and he wanted very much to stay in the service.

I was astounded to learn that he was also known by his friends and acquaintances as a very accurate palm reader and would tell the future that appeared to him in the lines of people's hands. When he developed this interest, I have no idea. But it reminded me that Chris had a second sense about people; he would make instant likes and dislikes to those he met. I had no doubt that he loved humanity and especially his mother. His relationship with his father was a good one, too.

Although I didn't want to talk to Derald (his father) and didn't for years, unless it had something to do with Chris, he kept pushing me to call Derald and talk with him. His desire to have us reconciled was something he never gave up on, and one day, sometime in the 1980s I guess, I called Derald and we talked on the phone for hours. We healed old wounds and spent time forgiving each other for our youthful mistakes. I knew after that phone call that Chris was responsible for removing our old painful memories and replacing them with good ones. Not long after that phone call, Derald died suddenly. He was only 51, and his son Chris would die of the same thing: sudden cardiac death.

Chris has been gone for nine years now, and I didn't see him in person during the last four years of his life, but he lives on in my memories, and I'm sure also in the memories of many others who knew and loved him. The infant I held in my arms almost fifty years ago grew into a very special person who made a difference in the world. Chris, I love you, I will always love you until the day I die.

And then, if there is life after death, we will meet again and I'll join you over a cup of coffee and we'll tell stories of our adventures since we were last together on Earth.

They started it all

2011-08-07T07:11:00.000-07:00

Here are my parents, back when they had no children, when they only had each other and their own families, before they made us. My mom had beautiful dark eyes and auburn hair, showing her Spanish heritage, and Daddy's eyes were blue as the sky, with light sandy hair, reflecting his Scotch/Irish ancestry. They had seven children (one died after being born prematurely, Tina Maria), but the six of us who grew to adulthood are all still here. We got together last March in Texas, honoring my brother-in-law Pete, Norma Jean's husband, who died in February. It was a good reunion, although now our extended family is so huge that it was, at times, overwhelming.

All of my siblings have grandchildren, except for my brother Buz, whose daughter Trish is married but not yet a mother. Maybe never, I'm not sure how she feels about it. And my sister Markee's kids are teenagers and not yet married. I am the only one who doesn't have any possibility of grandchildren, but still our family gatherings are enormous. The siblings, which Buz cleverly dubbed the "Sixlings" many years ago, have a few characteristics in common, and I wonder how much they are caused by the genetic makeup that stems from our parents.

Our parents were both above average in intelligence, and all of their children are, too. This is not surprising in itself, but what I really wonder about is our tendency towards attention to detail and perfectionism. Sort of a mild form of OCD, in a way. It's what makes me a good editor; I can't help but see a misspelled word or incorrect punctuation. (It doesn't mean I don't make those mistakes myself, but when I'm working I am quite good at fixing other people's work.) Norma Jean worked at hospitals building databases for medical records; P.J. absolutely LOVES any kind of spreadsheet and can build one in a jiffy. My brother Buz has worked for years as a computer whiz and if I want to know how to do something I will ask him. He will then send me very detailed step-by-step instructions.

The two siblings that I am farthest from in age, Markee and Fia, were both born after I left home and had children of my own. They are very close to each other, but I don't know them very well. Markee is an R.N. and earned several scholarships when she was growing up; and Fia, the youngest, also works for a team of doctors and can help any of us get the medical care we might need. Every single one of us is good at paying attention to detail and every one of us has excelled in his or her job. Most of us never finished college, however. I never had the chance since I started having babies at nineteen, and Norma Jean also married early and dropped out of college. Besides, in the sixties women weren't supposed to go to college unless it was to find a suitable husband. That's what I thought then, anyway.

My own particular symptom is that I count things. I cannot walk up a flight of steps without counting them, usually in sets of fours or eights. I know the number of steps of every place that I go every day, and as I walk up them, counting, it gives me some sort of satisfaction, I can't say exactly what. (The number of steps doesn't vary, but my method of counting them does.) In my exercise class, I always count the number of people in the class at the beginning and notice when someone arrives late or leaves early, adjusting the count in my head. I count the number of people on the bus. I don't know why I do this, but I do.

I don't have any problem with the uncounted jumble of books on my desk or my pencils being misaligned, but I do like straight lines. Sometimes I'll be walking and will make sure that I turn corners precisely, not making short cuts. When I make the bed, I like the lines on the quilt to be in exactly in the same place each time. Now that I'm retired, I seem to be more aware of these things, maybe because I have plenty of time to spend noticing them, or maybe I do it more often.

My siblings all have habits that I recognize as being part of me, too. Did we get this way because our genetic makeup from Mama and Daddy caused it? It's a mystery to me, but it's also quite comforting to think that our parents gave us an invisible thread, joining us to one another, that comes from them and extends on and on through the generations that follow us. It started somewhere way back with our distant ancestors and came to fruition in the unique joining of our mother and father. How cool is that?

I've just barely scratched the surface of this subject, which I'll visit again. It's Sunday morning and I've fulfilled my self-imposed task of writing this post as the sun has arisen and the early morning light spills into the room. I hear the birds now, they are awake on this beautiful August day, and my partner is beginning to stir next to me. My day awaits.

Skydiving day

2011-07-31T06:33:00.000-07:00

Our six-way participants, 30 July 2011

Just to show how one's plans for a weekend can change in an instant! Yesterday was all planned out: get up early and head to Lake Whatcom and make a six-mile walk along the North Shore with the Fairhaven Walkers, dash to the Farmers' Market for a quick look around, and then swim my usual Saturday half mile in the pool. But when I woke up and checked the weather forecast, Saturday was forecast to be sunny and beautiful, and Sunday (today) cloudy with a 50% chance of rain.

So I quickly changed my plans and drove down to Snohomish to meet my friend Linny (the other white-haired skydiver in the picture) and friends to make some jumps. This was my original schedule for today, and since I can't exactly switch, I've ended up with NO PLANS for the day, other than this early morning post.

The weather was the only thing that could have caused this change, because you can't skydive if you can't see the ground. Skydiving is required by the FAA to operate under visual flight rules (VFR), since you wouldn't want to climb up above the clouds and jump out of the plane only to find there is an aircraft that you couldn't see! And indeed, as I sit here in the early morning, I find that it's overcast and dark outside, no sunshine anywhere to be seen. I made the right choice. Yesterday was a spectacular day.

Within the space of five hours of jumping and packing, we made four skydives and I packed my own parachute three of those times. Once, we had to make a quick turnaround call, so I hired Tony, one of the Drop Zone's regular packers, to do it for me. It costs $6 and I told him that if I had a good opening I would give him another dollar. It was a beautiful opening, something I am still trying to perfect with my new canopy. Every single canopy has its own quirks, and this one wants to open, all right, so I need to slow that process down a bit. Tony's and Smart Guy's pack jobs do this, so I know it's possible.

I had budgeted enough money to make four jumps, so I was ready to leave by 2:30pm. As I was packing up after the last jump of the day, I managed to wrench my lower back in an ill-advised move. By the time I finished, I knew that I wouldn't have wanted to make another jump anyway. After taking some ibuprofen and spending a night feeling that lower back pain, I'm thinking it should be okay within another day or two, but it's sure not fun hobbling around moaning. I had just made four skydives without incident and then hurt myself packing! Sometimes life is funny that way.

I was really looking forward to swimming yesterday, since the pool is now closed for two weeks for its regular maintenance. I'll probably try to find an alternate place for at least one swim, since the activity has become a very relaxing and contemplative complement to my other physical pursuits. There's something so soothing about the breathing and stroking, and before a few minutes has passed, I enter a zone of peacefulness that nothing else provides. I have taught myself to breathe on alternate sides, with three strokes in between, in order to provide symmetry to the workout. My arms are usually a little sore after swimming for a half hour, and my legs feel worked out in a different way. When I climb out of the pool and lose the buoyancy of the water, I feel heavy and need a moment to readjust to land.

I started swimming in Florida in February when I visited Norma Jean and kept it up as a way to feel connected to her. It's been a real surprise that I have learned to enjoy it so much. Between hiking with the Senior Trailblazers, skydiving on the weekends, and swimming and taking aerobic classes at the Y, I guess you might say I'm a rather active Senior. The saying that you need to "use it or lose it" is becoming more and more evident as I age. Taking time off from exercise is not something I want to do, and this annoying pain in my back is reminding me to take it easy today so I can begin the week in good shape.

Retirement for me is only retiring from the working world, certainly not retiring from working out, or being engaged in life. My blogging life fulfills a need, too: I would certainly miss it if I stopped, not to mention missing all my friends, whose comments and blogs provide me with a community of like-minded companions. You are an essential part of my life. Thank you for being there.

Alcohol and me

2011-07-24T05:30:00.000-07:00

When I was growing up, we had this bar in every home we lived in. Here's a picture of it, with Norma Jean and her doll on one side, and Mama and me on the other. This photo was taken in either Puerto Rico, where we lived from the time I was three until I turned six, or in California. I started school on Ramey Air Force Base when I was five, so I suspect we got the bar while we lived in Puerto Rico in the late 1940s. In any event, it traveled with us from home to home, until Mama and Daddy retired in Fort Worth, where it had a place of honor in their retirement home, called Windswept. Over the years I remember the barstools that are missing from this picture, and I remember so well the glass on the top displaying pictures of family and cartoons that had been arranged underneath, protected from spills and remarked on, reminisced over, for many years.

As a military family, I think alcohol and its pervasive presence in our lives was not unusual. It seemed that every one of my parents' friends drank, and some of them drank heavily. My parents would host gatherings in their home after a day of golf when we lived in Puerto Rico. (I lived there as a small child and then Daddy returned again to the same Air Base when I was a teenager. The bar came with us wherever we moved.) Most times when I would go to bed I would hear the party going strong. It was somehow comforting to hear my parents enjoying themselves so much. Of course, at the time I didn't know how much the alcohol contributed to their merriment.

Even when they were up late, Daddy never failed to get up with us and get us off to school. He was a morning person and was awake while Mama stayed in bed. She was definitely NOT a morning person but stayed awake long after Daddy had fallen asleep. I remember many nights at Windswept when the kids would come into their bedroom to talk to Mama, and Daddy was asleep next to her. She worked on her latest knitting project and counseled them about whatever was on their minds. Daddy snored away, the lights on and Mama and the kids talking at a normal volume. I had already grown up and left home, which is a natural consequence of having their six kids spread out over twenty years. As the oldest, the only time I lived at Windswept was when I was leaving a husband and trying to start my life over.

Windswept was located on Lake Worth, and my three youngest siblings grew up on the lake. This picture of Mama taken on the dock shows her drinking their favorite beverage, martinis. I also think that martinis were part of the military tradition, but I only have my parents and their habits to go by. I am positive this martini was prepared by Daddy from the libations they kept behind the bar. Because I never knew anything else, I thought everyone drank martinis every night. I would beg for the olive, because I liked the mysterious taste of the gin it was soaked in. But I couldn't ever understand what they liked about the taste of martinis, which seemed pretty awful to me.

But as I grew older, I found that I did like a glass of wine, and when I started skydiving in my forties, the skydivers all drank beer after a day playing in the sky. When you accomplish something in skydiving the first time, it is your duty to buy a case of beer to share with all the other skydivers. This ensured that at the end of the day, we would all have plenty to drink. I bought so much beer as a newbie that I learned to drink it, too. And I enjoyed it as much as anybody.

It's interesting to me that none of my siblings drink to excess, although our parents did. Norma Jean and I have exactly the same amount of wine at the end of each day, and I only occasionally drink beer these days, since it tends to be more fattening than wine. One sister doesn't drink at all, and the rest of them imbibe at special occasions but not every day. I think Norma Jean and I are the only daily drinkers. None of us drink hard spirits like gin and vodka.

I asked Norma Jean the other day if she knew what happened to that bar, a particular focal point in our daily lives over many decades. She doesn't remember. When Daddy died, Mama moved out of the house on Windswept and built herself a home in Texoma. The bar wasn't there. In fact, if I didn't know better, I'd think perhaps it was cremated along with my father. In my mind, it stopped existing when he did. All those years of entertaining guests and sometimes watching my parents getting really tipsy, it just seemed normal to me.

I have overindulged in alcohol myself at parties and even sometimes in my own home. I don't do that any more, because I've found that when I drink more than my self-imposed allotment, I don't sleep well and I feel sick, hung over, the next day. It's just not worth it, and I've learned that a second glass of wine will NOT give me what I'm looking for.

These days, my contentment comes from many other sources, but the ghost of my parents laughing and singing along to their favorite melodies still echoes in the corridors of my mind. Perhaps it's the corridors of my heart.

Peace and quiet

2011-07-17T06:23:00.000-07:00

From Nicolya Christi

Is there anyone who doesn't look forward to having some peace and quiet? I remember my parents when I was little asking their rowdy children to let them have a little "peace and quiet."

I wondered what I would write about this morning, and several times during the night that phrase kept coming to me. In the summertime we usually have the bedroom window completely open, and the sounds of the night sometimes includes the sound of a barking dog. Incessant, sharp yaps, which utterly destroys my peace and keeps me awake. Last night I fell asleep at an early hour, as I usually do, and that sound brought me back into consciousness. I tried to ignore it, but of course I couldn't.

Here in Bellingham within the city limits, dogs are not allowed to destroy one's peace and quiet like that, but that would mean getting up, finding the telephone number to call, staying on the line while I am connected to the police station, and making a complaint. That was going to make it even harder to get back to sleep. But as the sound continued, I got up and put on my robe and slippers and went outside to follow the sound to its source. At midnight, I was amazed to see how much activity was still going on: two people rode by me on bicycles in the dark, several apartment dwellers were watching television with all the doors and windows open.

I found the source of the barking in a house on the other side of the driveway, and as I approached, it stopped. The barking stopped. The only sounds I could hear were of faraway traffic and crickets hidden somewhere in the grass. A conversation from somewhere between two people wafted out of dark, so I crept back up the stairs to my own apartment. I climbed back into bed and snuggled back into my covers. As I drifted back into sleep, it started again. Same dog barking. This time, I was determined to get back to sleep, find my peace and quiet and contemplated ear plugs. But then it stopped, this time for good. The dog's owners had apparently taken him inside. My peace and quiet was restored and I fell asleep.

This morning as I sit in bed, tea beside me and my laptop in its usual place, the sounds that I hear all contribute to my morning peacefulness, rather than bother me. First, the distant sound of the rooster who crows from an hour before first light... somehow that sound is not annoying but rather restful. The birds chirping in the trees, an incessant trill alongside the familiar sound of my goldfinches, and the sound of the keys being depressed on my laptop. It's Sunday morning, and after having most of my sleep uninterrupted, I'm in a particularly good mood.

The world we live in has become very noisy, and as population pressures mount, finding some peace and quiet has become problematic. I don't think I'm the only person who needs it. Some people may thrive in a chaotic environment, but I sure don't. I am bothered by certain sounds and too much light. Sleeping on a plane is impossible for me, or anywhere that is unfamiliar or doesn't give me the ability to stretch out and turn onto my side. My own bed is the best place for me to sleep, with the temperature cool enough to allow me to have a light covering, more for the ability for me to burrow into it than for warmth, at least in summer. And I need relative quiet, which most nights I get plenty of.

But as I sit here thinking, wondering where I'm going with this post, I realize that the state of my mind is what contributes the most to my inner peace. If something is bothering me, it continues to roll around inside my head, interrupting my sleep and invading my dreams. When my thoughts are peaceful, I sleep incredibly well. It does make me wonder if I could somehow rise above the sound of the barking dog and fall asleep anyway. No, somehow I cannot picture that happening, but then again... imagination is a powerful tool, and maybe I can transmute that annoyance into acceptance. Maybe, but taking action and making a complaint might be the right path, too.

The gloomy skies and rain of yesterday seem to have lifted, and today might actually allow us to make a few skydives in Snohomish; I'm hopeful. Last Sunday I was able to make two and play in the air with my friends. I came home from the day's activities rather early and spent all day Monday hiking with some other friends. My life is very full, it seems, and I look forward to every day that I am given with gratitude. I am grateful for all the peace and quiet I have, inside and out.

A mixed bag

2011-07-10T05:53:00.000-07:00

Peggy took this picture of me on Thursday while we were on our regular Trailblazers hike. I like it for several reasons, the first of which is it looks like me these days. My hair is getting very white, and my face is clean of any makeup. The expression tells the story of how I've been feeling this week, along with the title of this post: a mixed bag.

The last two Thursdays we have driven up the road to the Mt. Baker wilderness area, leaving Bellingham's sunshine behind and ascending into the clouds. Although it makes for nice cool hiking weather, there have been little to no views. I miss seeing my beautiful mountains. I did get to see them last Tuesday, since it was sunny and four of us took off for a new trail. Our big problem this year is the snow. You can't get anywhere above 4,000 feet without walking on snow, and several of our favorite hikes will be inaccessible all season long.

It was beautiful here on the Fourth. Being retired, I find that holidays no longer carry the excitement I felt when I had a day off from work. The buses don't run, the Y is closed, and my entire day's schedule is thrown off. There was no reason to get up at my normal time, but I did anyway, sitting up in bed and reading my blogs while drinking my tea. I buried myself in a book for most of the day and spent some time with Smart Guy. Other than that, I simply waited for life to return to normal. The fireworks went on and on, and I didn't get to sleep until very late. I watched from the window as they exploded over the bay, until I got tired of the noise.

Wednesday I spent hours in the dentist's chair getting prepped for another crown. I don't know when I became so anxious when having dental work, but I dreaded it and was tense the entire time. Olivia (my dentist) told me that next time, if I have someone drive me there and pick me up, she will give me a prescription for valium, so that I can relax a little and not be such a wreck. That made me feel better, although she offered nitrous oxide right then if I was willing to pay $50/hour for it. I declined. Just the possibility of having some relief made me feel better.

The day that the above picture was taken, I was suffering from discomfort as the new temporary crown, put in place the day before, needed adjustment. It was impossible to tell while I had all that novocain in me, but I knew that it wasn't right and that the office would be closed on Friday. Reconciled to the pain, I figured it would be next week before I could get it adjusted. However, on the way back down from the hike, once we reached cellphone reception (there is none in the wilderness area), I called to find that if I could get there by 4:00pm, they could see me. It was 3:00 in the afternoon, and I made it there with minutes to spare. Olivia was waiting for me, and with just a quick adjustment, all the pain went away! What a difference just a tiny little bump made in my mood! Olivia thanked ME for coming in. I walked out of her office feeling much better.

Yesterday was a really good day, which I wrote about here in my other blog, and today we will head down to Snohomish to play in the air with my friends. That's why this week has been such a mixed bag. I have spent a bit of time on iChat with Norma Jean, who is finally getting her life together. She leaves on Wednesday in her brand-new car for a three-day trip to Michigan, where she will spend some time with her son. This is her first new car since she graduated from high school, and it is one she wished to buy for years, a Mini Cooper. Pete wasn't a fan of small cars. It makes me happy to see her stepping into her own life, one that has a quite different flavor without him. She's through the hardest times, I suspect.

And now I sit in my bed, propped up as usual with my laptop, listening to the young flicker pounding away on the suet feeder and the rooster across the way that starts crowing at first light and doesn't stop for hours. The sound doesn't bother me, as it blends well with that of all the birds in the trees that serenade the dawn.

It's definitely the beginning of an interesting mid-July summer's day. I hope your Sunday is a good one, and I'll be back in a week.

How the past lives on

2011-07-03T07:21:00.000-07:00

Even though in this picture I am just a little girl, I remember this moment, I even remember the feeling of the sand and how scared I was because I couldn't move; I couldn't climb out by myself. That's Norma Jean behind me, and Daddy's bare knees on the right. There is something about emotion that can freeze a moment in time and make it live in the mind forever. People talk about what they were doing when they first heard about 9/11, or when President Kennedy was shot, or when some defining moment in their lives occurred. It's what our minds do.

When I woke last week and wrote my usual Sunday post, I could not have predicted the response; many of your comments made me cry with gratitude. And when Whitney even provided me with the quote reminding me of the reason I began this blog, I was, quite simply, humbled to realize the power of the blogosphere, of the connections we make with one another, and with ourselves. As a writer, most of the time when you write something, you get little to no feedback about how the words affect others, because until recently unless you became a published author, found someone to publish your work and later read the reviews, you couldn't know how people would be affected by your thoughts, your words. It's a new world, brand new.

Going through the past week has given me time to allow the lingering places in my heart that remain unhealed to percolate up to the surface. Dreams help, too. I overslept this morning, waking from a dream of struggle. As I made my way into the waking world, I realized I was hearing a squirrel on the front porch screeching at something out of sight. After shooing him off the porch, I noticed that it rained again last night, after a brilliant blue cloudless day yesterday.

Everyone has those defining moments. The one in the picture might have been one of my earliest. Fear made me remember being buried in the sand deep enough that I couldn't get out without help. Daddy was roaring with laughter at my fear, providing a sound track that also lives on in my brain. My cries and his laugh. He dug me out, but not before someone, probably Mama, took a picture and preserved it for me to relive that moment. Even though I now know that there was no real danger, it existed so perfectly for me in the moment that the cold sand felt like cement, entombing me there forever.

I carry a coin in my pocket that belonged to Chris. It's one of those commemorative ones that are given to put on a desk or display in some place in order to remember a moment in time. It's got the Big Red One on it, among other things, the symbol of his unit and it says "In Recognition of Superior Performance." I asked his commanding officer when I was in Germany for Chris' memorial service if he knew why it had been given, but he didn't know. Nobody seemed to know, but I carry that large coin to give me a reminder of Chris. Since it's been almost nine years ago since he died, I rarely take it out and study it, just reaching past it to find spendable coins. It's become something I would feel strange not having with me. I don't think about it and usually leave it behind if I reach in to pull out a handful of change. It's personal, and I don't like the interest it attracts; it's my own private talisman and I keep it to myself. Unless, that is, I choose to share it with loved ones as I am doing today.

Positive life-changing events also define before and after moments for me, too. Skydiving was a big deal, which I began at the tail end of 1990, so when I think of something in the past, I recall when it occurred by whether it was before that time, or after. Since almost every single moment of my first decade of skydiving was spent either jumping, thinking about jumping, or waiting until I could get to the Drop Zone, it makes sense. It's not that way now, though. Yesterday I went to Snohomish and made a couple of skydives, playing with my friends and having a really good time, but no single thing happened that will make that day stay in my mind forever. It will blend into memories of a summer of great beauty and happiness at being alive and vibrant in a wonderful part of the country. Unless, that is, some life-changing event occurs that will put a marker in my brain recalling it in vivid detail. I hope not.

I'm ready for some time to allow my life to settle into what passes for old age in my world. Oh, I know that old ladies don't usually jump out of airplanes and hike every week for ten miles with a backpack, but times are changing. And who knows how long I can continue to do it? For as long as I can, I will.

Random Sunday morning thoughts

2011-06-26T06:15:00.000-07:00

This portrait of very wet flower, taken a week or so ago, evokes the feeling I woke up with this morning. Tossing and turning during the night, I wondered what I would write about and considered skipping it altogether. I've gotten used to writing something here that I am proud of, that makes other people think, and that generates positive comments. In other words, I've become self-consciously aware of what I'm writing about, and my spontaneity is in danger of drying up in that environment. I'm just going to feel the raindrops and let them soak into me for a bit.

Yesterday my friend Judy and I went to the local art theater and saw The Tree of Life. I had heard all kinds of things about it, since it won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival this year. Most of what I had heard was positive, but one of the reviews from someone I knew didn't like the film at all. The link above (from Wikipedia) tells you about it, what it is, and there is no danger at all in revealing the plot, because there really isn't one. From that link:

The film chronicles the origins and meaning of life through the eyes of a 1950s Texas family, while also featuring sci-fi and surrealist themes and imagery through space and the birth of life on Earth. ... It opened in limited release on May 27, 2011 to positive reviews on its technical and artistic merits, yet also received polarizing reactions in response to Malick's directorial style and, in particular, with the film's fragmented and non-linear narrative.

There were moments when I was absolutely overwhelmed with the film's imagery, and other moments when I wished the movie would end soon so I could be released from the theater. Brad Pitt is perfect as a stern father and evoked all kinds of emotions within me, as did the other performances. They were all pitch-perfect, but the death of one of the sons when he was nineteen, never explained but a central part of the story, is one of the reasons I spent last night in turmoil. It brought up all those thoughts of loss that dwell within me, within any person who has lost a loved one, and what it all means in the larger perspective of life.

We are such insignificant little specks in the vast universe, and no film I've seen before this one has ever brought that concept into such vivid focus. When the lights came on at the end of the movie, nobody said a word, and we, the audience, filed out of the theater in silence. Coming up from what seemed to be the bottom of a well into the bright late afternoon sunlight on a June day, we went our separate ways with our separate reactions.

Judy and I were planning to have dinner, and a sign strategically placed in front of the theater pointed us to the Mount Bakery restaurant right across the street, so we headed over there. Another couple who had seen the movie also came in for dinner, and I asked what they thought of it. It turned out that the wife knew from the reviews she wouldn't like it, so she sat in the car and read a book while hubby saw it. He was as confused about his feelings as I was. Judy was obviously disappointed in it, and I just didn't know what to think. But last night as I lay in bed, tired and ready for sleep, images and messages from the movie kept coming back to me. A sense of rightness about the love we carry for those who are gone before us, for those parts of ourselves who are no longer here but exist in our memories, kept entering my thoughts and somehow comforting me. That's the only way I can describe it.

I feel sometimes that I've spent way too much time here on this blog lamenting my losses, holding onto them as though they define me in some sense. The feeling I got from this movie is that in the very fact of being alive and conscious, we are all destined to experience loss and grief, as well as incredible beauty. Universal forces are so vast and so far beyond our understanding that it is truly an impossibility to make sense of it. Our world, our own private universes, are infinitesimal specks in the cosmos, but somehow this movie gave me the feeling that it doesn't matter, or that it all matters the same as the vast nebulae that we peer at through our telescopes. Or as the microbes we view through our microscopes.

In the final analysis, we are each one of us alone and separate from one another, but our activities bring us into community with those who matter to us. My electronic reaching out to you, dear reader, connects me to you in a way I don't pretend to understand. But you matter to me as we send out our thoughts to one another. The sharing of our hopes and dreams, our sense of loss and love, and acknowledging those connections is as real as any of the other magnificent facets of our lives.

My daddy's knees

2011-06-19T06:20:00.000-07:00

Yet another picture from the bunch that Pete had gathered and which now reside on my laptop. This one was taken when I was somewhere around a year old, and I imagine Daddy balancing me on his shins, telling me to hold on tight, while he worked with the camera to get me in focus and make the picture just right. He did a good job. I wish I could remember that moment, today, on Father's Day 2011. But of course I don't.

My earliest recollection of my father was sitting in his lap and seeing my small hand placed on top of his much larger one. I remember the difference in the color, his brown and masculine, mine creamy white and smooth. Whether I truly remember it or not, it's clear in my mind's eye. That amazing eye, it sees things as it pleases, whether or not it matches reality. But what is reality anyway, when thinking of times and people long gone? There is no objective observer to recall what once was, and my sister Norma Jean and I will recall a long-ago memory, with both of us remembering it completely differently. Time has a way of doing that.

Daddy was only 62 when he died of a heart attack, and although he seemed old to me then, he was six years younger than I am now. If he were alive today, he would be really old, almost a hundred since he was born in 1917. All six of his children were present when he died, since he lingered for a few days after a massive heart attack and we all had the chance to get to the hospital. He was on morphine for the pain, and I remember how his pupils were little pinpoints in his still-brilliant blue eyes. I was told by someone that was caused by the drugs.

He had a good life, and I know that he and Mama loved each other, even if they sometimes fought. After I became an adult, Mama would complain to me about his faults. But basically I would say they had a better than average marriage and they raised six kids together, with twenty years separating me from my youngest sister Fia. These days I know only a few people whose parents stayed together; it seemed to me during the sixties and seventies that almost everyone was leaving long-time partners, thinking somehow that life would pass them by if they didn't go out and grab it. I hope they found what they were looking for, but somehow I doubt it. One thing I've learned over the years is that I carry my illusions from one situation to the next, still intact.

Daddy had a very soft heart, he was sentimental about everything. I remember him being brought to tears over what seemed, even to me at the time, insignificant things to get teary over. He read to us when I was little, and I recall him crying when in a story some injustice was done, or someone or something died. Cinderella or Lassie moved him to tears. He hated that about himself and felt somehow that it wasn't manly behavior. It's too bad that he lived in a time when he couldn't appreciate his ability to feel things deeply. Is it still that way with men? I would hope we have grown and changed at least a little.

His voice was strong and deep. If he wanted to, he could use it to intimidate others. Norma Jean told me recently how scared her son Peter was of Daddy, who would tremble in fear when Daddy would raise his voice at him. Her daughter Allison, however, would just look at Daddy, smile and say, "Oh, Grandpa," and he would melt into smiles himself. Consequently, they have completely different memories of their grandfather.

Both of my parents were avid readers and had very large vocabularies, with an ability to express themselves fluently. When you are surrounded by something like that, you don't realize it's not that way with everybody, every family. Daddy would sometimes sit in the living room after dinner and pontificate about the world, the universe, life in general. I was enthralled, a willing audience, and believed that kind of expansive eloquence was simply the way every adult communicated. Even though he never went to college, Daddy had a natural intelligence that was obvious to anyone who held a conversation with him.

I miss him, I just realized with a shock. Writing about him makes me feel the loss of his presence, and it's been a long time since that has happened. I have been sitting here trying to get the feel of him, who he was, and darned if that's not just what I did.

Daddy, it's been a long time since we talked. If you were here, maybe you would have some words of wisdom for me today, and it's my loss that I don't know what you would tell me if you could. If there is any justice in the world, maybe the universe will channel your spirit and send it to me in a dream...

Understanding passion

2011-06-12T06:46:00.000-07:00

This picture was taken in 2006 of Nanjing Road in Shanghai, where I had traveled for work. We held a conference there, and I would follow Mickey, my ex-boss, into the streets every evening after we had finished work for the day. It was how he decompressed and got ready for the next day: he would walk the streets for hours, looking into store windows and observing the people in whatever city we were in. I learned quite a bit, but for me it was an exercise in endurance; I was usually exhausted but knew I would sleep better if I joined him.

During the last two decades of my job, I traveled internationally and had the opportunity to be in so many parts of the world: China (six times in various cities), Hanoi, Saigon, Bangkok, Moscow, Paris, Budapest, Macao, and so many others that escape me at the moment. What's important is not the number of places, but how much my life was filled with adventure and what was packed into those years. I remember once when we organized three separate meetings in a single year, and I was so busy I could barely keep up. There was no room in my life for boredom.

During those same years, I also managed to spend every weekend and every vacation skydiving, making as many as 400 jumps annually! When I look back at my life, it is rather amazing that I accomplished so much without noticing. And those years were also spent in a relationship that went from being very rocky to rock solid, which it is today. We have accomplished what seemed to be an impossible task. Perhaps it helped that I was so busy, but for whatever reason we learned to be together and appreciate each other for who we really are.

My life has been a full one, but now I am living in Bellingham, Washington, and retirement has settled around me like a warm blanket. In the three years we have been here, my life has taken on a completely different tone from its earlier passionate involvement. My skydiving journey has dwindled from 400 to 40 jumps in a year, and even that much smaller number is beginning to fall away. Travel is from here to Vancouver or Seattle, unless I am forced to travel by plane because of a loved one's passing. I realize that my life is full in a completely different way that it was during my working years. Passion is fading to contentment. This must be a natural progression, but until now I haven't realized what is happening. Am I okay with it?

The passion I felt for skydiving was akin to falling in love. I remember those first years, when I would wake on the weekend and jump from bed to see if the sky was blue. It didn't matter whether it was July or December, I would head to the Drop Zone just in case I might be able to make a jump. The staff expected to see me, and I now see other skydivers who are just like I was then. But I'm not there any more. I come home from a day at the Drop Zone, as I did last Sunday after three jumps, and the old passion is missing. It was fun, but it wasn't nourishing like it once was.

After I traveled to Colorado in December to attend Emily's memorial, I remember feeling so glad to be home wrapped in the arms of my life partner and snuggled in my own bed, with travel being a burden rather than an adventure. It was Christmastime in Boulder, and I saw my old city all lighted up and decorated, but it was no longer my home. My place is here in the rainy and sometimes dreary Pacific Northwest.

At first, I thought it behooved me to find a new passion, to fall madly in love with something new. I looked for it in volunteer work, exercise, hiking into the mountains, but it was not to be found anywhere. When I was a young woman, I would fall in love with someone and it was magical -- for a time. But it didn't ever stay that way, so I would move onto another person and would fall in love again. I thought I just hadn't found the right one yet. One day I realized that I only knew how to be in a relationship in its beginning stages and hadn't learned how to have a mature love. I am reminded of the saying "familiarity breeds contempt." I thought that was real.

As I move towards my eighth decade, which hopefully will start in a few short years, I am beginning to realize that the passions of the body have begun to dim and the passions of my heart are flaming into life. Today I feel things so much more deeply than I did when I was young, and the loss of a fallen wild bird strikes deep within my heart. My passion has mellowed like a fine wine, into something that allows me to enjoy it slowly, and with deep gratitude for the opportunity to be here, alive and present.

Going skydiving today

2011-06-05T06:02:00.000-07:00

Yes, it's been a month since I last went skydiving. Although we have had a day here and there with blue skies, it's not been on a weekend, until today. This picture was taken years ago in Arizona when I was vacationing at a skydiving boogie. I'm over there on the lower left (purple, white helmet) and Smart Guy is the white one behind me, barely visible. It was an organized skydive, meaning that the sequence and placement of each participant was predetermined.

When I was making frequent skydives, five or six a day at these events, the scariest part of each jump was performance anxiety. Since you have all those other people all paying for their own ticket, everyone wants the jump to be successful; i.e., to complete what we set out to do. I trusted my gear and was quite familiar with the entire process, but I was never sure that I would not screw up in some way that would make me feel like I let them all down. Everyone felt the same.

One problem that happened often was misjudging the distance to the formation, which must build from the inside out. If you were on the outside, like we were, it was a frequent occurrence that someone might approach too quickly and "go low" -- be unable to slow down and approach carefully in order to take your grip. Then you would just sail past the formation and look up at it helplessly. It is a fragile formation and any forward momentum when you dock can be seen on the video camera as a ripple moves through from one side to the other. The cameraman who took this picture also is wearing a video camera.

After the skydive, we would all meet in the main hangar and debrief. Other skydivers not on the dive who were finishing packing or waiting for their load would also gather around. If I made a mistake, it would be shown over and over on the huge video screen while my burning cheeks flamed away. This would happen to each of us whose performance was not as planned, and you hoped that no comments would be directed your way. Since we were doing this for fun, we would be given a chance to go up on another skydive and try again. It was always exciting to learn how to correct a mistake and put it into practice.

But many skydivers are very competitive and want to make jumps with people who are much better than the rest of us. They knew who they were and stayed out of the organized jumps, which would take anyone who gave a ticket to the organizer. If someone screwed up repeatedly, the organizer would take him or her aside and suggest joining another group that would be making easier skydives. After a few days, you knew where you belonged. Year after year, I would see my fellow skydivers showing up at the Christmas boogie in Arizona, for instance, and we would happily jump together. A group of jumpers from the UK are in this picture and were regular fun jumpers. We looked for each other every year, and I only see them on Facebook these days. My boogie days are behind me.

Today my anxiety is not about performance, but about getting current again. When I haven't made a jump in awhile, I review in my mind all my emergency techniques and mentally picture myself opening my parachute and flying it in a landing pattern to the ground. I know that my friend Linny will organize an easy skydive because none of us is terribly current, with the weather having been uncooperative for so long. Butterflies and mental review are my friends. The 75-mile drive to Snohomish and back on the freeway are also nerve wracking, and I pay close attention to my speed and the drivers around me. But I do it, because I know the payoff is a day well spent playing in the sunshine with my friends, doing something I know how to do well, even if it has been awhile. After 4,000+ jumps, it's a familiar environment.

And today, Linda Myers, who has the blog "Thoughts of a Bag Lady in Waiting" will be driving to Snohomish from a nearby city to watch. I've never met her in person, but I feel like I know her. She retired from her job a year ago and has been going through her bucket list, with plenty of travel and helping to build a Habitat for Humanity home in New Orleans. She posted her plans for today on Facebook so I know I'll see her for sure. I'm looking forward to it and I'm making sure I don't forget to take my camera.

So that's the news from Bellingham, where all the men are good-looking, all the women are strong, and all the children are above average. (That's a ripoff from Garrison Keillor, for those of you who wonder where the heck THAT came from!)

Remembering

2011-05-29T06:38:00.000-07:00

This picture was taken of me with my little son Chris in the early 1960s. He was born in 1961 and would have celebrated his fiftieth birthday this coming November. I find that young girl holding him almost unrecognizable as my young self. Chris was born in Puerto Rico when my then-husband Derald was stationed at the Air Force Base. Derald must be on the other side of the camera, taking a picture of his family. Who could have told us what the future would hold? I wonder sometimes if we had a way to look ahead if any of us would have the courage to travel into the foreign land of our future selves.

Remembering on Memorial Day weekend, all of those loved ones who have fallen. Chris was in the Army when he died in 2002, but he didn't die in combat. He died of a heart attack. My father was in the Air Force but he died after he retired from the service. Derald was also in the Air Force, and he died at 51 of a heart attack. Heart disease took all three of the veterans in my immediate family, and the oldest of them was my father when he was only 62. It all seems to be so unfair, but fairness is not guaranteed anywhere in this world, it seems.

The people in the southern states who have seen their families, homes, livelihood all taken from them in a moment of time might be wondering why they were spared when their loved ones were not. I wonder that, too. Of course, the young mother in the picture no longer exists either. She is captured in an image on film that disintegrated years ago. It's only because my brother-in-law Pete scanned many family photos and put them into digital form that this picture exists at all. I have no memory of it and only saw it for the first time when visiting my sister this February after Pete's death. He and Derald were best friends and Derald must have shared that picture with him; a half century later it came into my life.

I have to admit to a little bit of envy when I read about the grandchildren my blogging friends share on their blogs, and even more of something akin to that emotion when a friend who is my age talks about going to visit her mother. How long my parents have been gone! Mama died in 1993 and Daddy in 1979. Although my siblings are all still here, and we all share the loss of our parents, I can see characteristics of my parents in them. But even more do I see them in the children of my siblings, so nothing is really lost. My nephew Peter will sometimes smile in a way that triggers a memory of my father. My sister will look at me over her glasses and I see my mother's expression on her face. Not having any grandchildren robs me of the experience of seeing Chris shining back at me through his children.

Even though he had no children, Chris was content with his life. I need to remember that and stop wishing for something that will never be. Yesterday I walked through the cemetery located adjacent to a local park, and flags were flying everywhere in one section. I realized that the cemetery has one place where all the veterans have been laid to rest. One of my walking companions told me she noticed that most of the cemeteries in our part of the country are segregated, with sections of veterans, Chinese, and Japanese all together. Much like they were in life, I guess. It never occurred to me but there it was.

Memories don't hold still, either. I realize when I read a book again that I read long ago... it's a new story, enjoyed today by another person than read it before. My memories are like that, too. Knowing how much my recollection is faulty when it comes to recalling past events, I have begun to think that might not be such a bad thing. I choose to remember my parents' best qualities, and I can look back on times gone by that are viewed through the lens of my love. Who cares whether they are factual or not? Certainly not me; I will remember my departed loved ones any way I please.

This reminds me how our life really does change when we concentrate on positive aspects. How different it would be if I chose to remember the pain and suffering that were also part of my past. The choice I have to make, every day, is to hold on to the beautiful memories and let the other ones drift lazily into nothingness.

Transitions

2011-05-22T06:17:00.000-07:00

Hooded mergansers, taken by Joe Meche

Spring is definitely in full swing here in the Pacific Northwest. I belong to a birder's email group and Joe Meche puts up pictures fairly regularly of birds he sees in the area. I thought this portrait of a hooded merganser and her babies was particularly sweet, but he also said that there were eight little "merganserlings" who quickly became four. These little hatchlings must be irresistible to many predators. That's just the way of life, I guess, so I try not to let it upset me too much. I also have hawks who are attracted to my front porch by the birds who come to my feeders. At first it bothered me, but it's just the way things are.

On my other blog I was complaining at the beginning of last week about the constant gloomy days, rain without end, it seemed, and almost immediately I was blessed with three days of sunshine that changed my mood from grumpiness to smiles. I noticed the difference everywhere, too: the expressions of my fellow riders on the bus; the exercise room filled with the sun's rays as we chatted before class about the beautiful weather; and the flowers opening up to the sun and seemingly smiling, too.

Then yesterday, just in time for Saturday and hopes to drive to Snohomish for a few skydives, the rain and low clouds returned. My day was changed from excitement to more of the same dreariness that I have become so accustomed to. Cliff Mass, my favorite weather blogger, explains here about the reason for what is called "June gloom" around these parts, which are caused by the transition between the cool weather of spring and the warmer weather to come in July. He explains it very well, but it appears that climate change will make it even more prevalent in the coming years. There are problems with the weather in almost every place I've ever lived, so I guess I'll get used to it and be grateful that we don't have tornadoes or cyclones or other major disasters on a regular basis.

What has been on my mind this past week has mostly focused on the imperceptible change from one state to another. This is true in the progression of the season from spring to summer across the Northern Hemisphere as well as the change in my emotional state from serenity to dissatisfaction. One moment I am happy and content, just minding my own business, and it feels like it will always be that way. I don't notice the shift, but then I slowly begin to realize that every little thing is causing me irritation. What changed? And when?

It's beginning to become clear that as I get older I have developed some chronic pain here and there. Most of the time I don't even notice these little aches, but occasionally I realize that it's a little like having a pebble in my shoe: I don't notice it at first, but as I walk through my life, that little pebble begins to feel like a boulder. If I don't stop and remove it, nothing else makes it to my consciousness and it becomes my sole focus. The realization that the aches and pains of life cannot be removed so easily tells me that I need to change my attitude about those annoyances.

This must be why it's so important to get perspective on things by stopping to smell the flowers, listening to the wind in the trees, the sound of birdsong, and being grateful for having the ability to make the decision to look beyond the mist to the sun behind the clouds. In just the short time it took to write this, my attitude and perspective have shifted to peaceful gratitude from the grumpiness I felt when I woke, looked out the window and saw the low clouds greeting me.

I might not be going skydiving again today, but I will head to the Y and swim for a half hour instead. There is something very enriching about swimming laps. I usually sneak a peek at the other swimmers and notice their technique to learn something new. The only really hard part about swimming for exercise is making myself get there and begin, donning earplugs, goggles and swim cap.

Yesterday I walked in the rain with my friends and we chatted as we walked briskly enough to keep ourselves warm. The pebble in my shoe was forgotten.

Stopping to smell the flowers

2011-05-15T06:08:00.000-07:00

I have noticed that several smells that were once very strong and pungent have become less so to my aging nose. This was brought to my attention just last week at the Senior Center. When I arrived early in the morning to meet my fellow hikers, I was forced to pass through a large room filled with plants, and one table was covered with blooming hyacinths. Although I well know the smell of these flowers, instead of the normal smell, I felt rather than smelled their fragrance. When Amy walked into the room, after just a few minutes of having been exposed to the flowers, her eyes were streaming and she couldn't stay. I was amazed to realize that my sense of smell is beginning to wane. It is not that my nose didn't react to the hyacinths, but it didn't react as I expected.

Ever since, I have stopped to smell the flowers, wondering how much of my sense of smell is gone. I know I can still smell certain things very strongly, but I began to wonder how much of my sense is really that I just know what something smells like in memory, and how much am I truly smelling. So of course I went to the magic box (my computer and Google) and checked it out. It turns out that all of our senses fade with age. This page on Aging Changes in the Senses was particularly interesting. It is a natural process that causes all of our senses to change, and not for the better. I already knew this about vision and hearing, but not about smelling. Another interesting page is from the Social Issues Research Centre called The Smell Report.

Hanging out with older people, as I do on my hikes with the Seniors, makes me aware that not all of us change and age in the same ways. But the older we get, the more our bodies begin to wear out. Not just our senses, but our knees and feet, our joints, the spring in our step. It's a natural process. I remember once on a hike when I was showing my friends a new app I had purchased for my iPod, with bird song to help identify the birds I have been hearing. Mike could not hear it at all, which amazed me, until I remembered that for some people, losing the higher registers of sound are the first to go. It made me grateful that I have not yet lost the ability to hear birds, since their songs give me great pleasure.

I found that I have indeed lost the ability to smell certain flowers that were once such strong fragrances to me. It turns out that allergies (which I have developed here in the Pacific Northwest) can be partly to blame, but after the age of sixty, our ability to smell begins to fade. It's part of life, so I am trying to come to terms with it. Since the lilacs have just come out in the past week, I've been going from bush to bush to see if I can get even a little of their smell. I found that when the sun comes out and warms the air, I can still smell them, but nothing like I remember from years past. I can still smell roses, but many hothouse flowers are deficient in smells anyway. Some odors are still very strong, and I have noticed that artificial smells like hair spray and powders seem stronger than ever. It's an unpleasant suffocating smell.

All of this introspection has caused me to think about what the future holds. Since it has been a gradual process, there is no demarcation line between being young and vibrant and old and worn out. In some cultures, age is revered. Not mine, though. When I see an advertisement on TV for a product, almost without fail the person in the ad is younger than me. The Febreze ad just came to mind, which tries to get me to purchase an artificial odor eliminator and replace any bad smells with their chemicals. In one ad, a man has just come home from work to a home to see Febreze on the table, apparently wafting a delightful odor into the air. It makes me wonder if the onslaught of all the chemicals we add into our environment is partly responsible for our sniffers wearing out prematurely.

Okay, I guess I can't actually consider that my faculties are wearing out prematurely. They are right on track, and when I look around at many people much younger than me, I can see they are not make the right decisions to be in good shape when they reach my advanced age. Seventy is just around the corner and I am making peace with it. But oh, how I remember loving to put my nose into a bouquet of flowers and be transported to heaven!

Mother's Day 2011

2011-05-08T06:05:00.000-07:00

Mama in Boulder, sometime in the 1980s

I realized, when I starting thinking about my usual Sunday post, that this is the third Mother's Day since I began this blog. In the beginning, I wrote a lot of posts about my parents, and this one is my favorite about her, which is simply entitled "My Mama." Everyone has one (a mother, I mean), even if she is no longer here, and that's what I've been thinking about. Sometimes on Saturday evenings, or during the night when I wake, I think about writing this post. It's usually something on my mind that I give myself permission to explore, and this Mother's Day it seems to be about the experience -- of having one, and of being one.

Just because your mother has died, it doesn't mean you don't have one. The experience of being mothered is deeply ingrained within us. I suppose some people who are raised in an orphanage or somehow separated from their natural mother might be an exception, but we are born into this world as tiny, helpless little creatures. It's true throughout the natural world. Last year I watched an eagle cam and peered into the nest at a loving set of parents feeding their infant chick, whose cries were answered by those doting birds. It aroused a deep emotion within me, and I cared for that infant and watched obsessively to make sure he was well taken care of. I know that my experience of having been cared for like that, caressed, fed, diapered, worried over, helped to shape me into the person I am today. Just because my mother is gone from this earth does not stop me from having had a loving mother and still benefiting from her love for me.

I was the oldest, and Mama was only nineteen when I was born; I was only nineteen when my son Chris was born, so Mama was a grandmother at what seems to me the incredibly young age of 38. She was still having children of her own then, and one of my sisters and my son were born only two months apart. That was a really long time ago now, and next year I will be the age Mama was when she died at 69. She seemed really young, and now that I am in her age ballpark, I know for a fact that she was both young but also lived a complete life. She was a widow with six grown children and lots of grandchildren when she died, and she is still missed and remembered with love by all of us. Two of my siblings changed their Facebook profiles in the last week to pictures of Mama. I thought about doing the same thing, but I have the luxury of this blog that gives me another outlet for this day. Happy Mother's Day, Mama, wherever you are.

And just because my two sons are no longer here does not mean that Mother's Day does not apply to me as well. Stephen died after only having been on this planet for thirteen months, and it was in the early 1960s, so long ago that the memory of him is lost to me. The pain that I bore for so many years is now gone, too. Today, I can rejoice in my beautiful grandniece Lexie and other small children. That was not the case for many years; I turned away from any infant because the pain was so intense. Now when I think back, the memory of that pain is like a scar on my heart. I can feel it was there, but it's healed over and has become a part of who I am today. It no longer hurts, but when I feel the edges of that scar with my mind, I can easily recall those years.

Even the more recent of my losses, my son Chris, is no longer so painful, but it's only been nine years ago that he died, so that emotional scar is still red and hurting. But today when I think of Chris, I remember his laugh; it was so uniquely his own that its sound comes to me across the depths of time. Just because your children are gone, you are still a mother. Everyone's child, if they are fortunate, grows up and away from their parents anyway. Things just never stay the same.

The nature of life is change, and the older I grow, the more I realize that trying to hold onto any moment in time is fruitless. We are both blessed and cursed by our memories, but I would never willingly give up mine. It's true that they may not be not the same events that actually occurred in the past, as they have been changed by my ability to recall them through the lens of my faulty memory. My mother's faults have fallen away and I remember her only with love and tenderness. Even when I recall something she did that gave me grief in the past, now I smile and wonder why it was such a big deal back then.

This is actually a gift, I realize now. Memories are not cast in stone and unchanging, just as all life is amorphous and unpredictable. We just have to ride the waves and remember the good times.

May Day Reflections

2011-05-01T06:00:00.000-07:00

I took this picture on our last full day in Beijing in June 2007. That was the last time I was in China, but I was fortunate to travel there six different times during my years working at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder. This time, I was working there for a month doing a job for the Higher Education Press, checking the level of English translation for several different scientific journals. Smart Guy accompanied me. It was a wonderful month in many ways, but it was also very hard work. Every weekend we were taken by someone in the office to see the sights, which varied from the Great Wall to the Summer Palace. This last day, just the two of us went together to visit these gardens. It was a rainy day and if you enlarge the picture, you can see people in the distance with their umbrellas on the other side of the lake filled with lotus leaves.

I was able to travel a great deal during the latter part of my three decades at NCAR. When our administrator of many years, Maria, decided to retire, her position as the organizer for our boss Mickey's many conferences and workshops around the world fell to me. I was responsible for finding a venue for the meeting, making the arrangements to get the scientists and researchers to that place, and he knew that if it was a place that most people would otherwise not be able to visit, he could attract well-known and otherwise unattainable scientists to attend and provide their expertise.

It was also my job to take notes during the meeting so we could collaborate, he and I, on a report for the proceedings and get it onto the Web. These reports are all still available through his website now located at the University of Colorado. The meeting we held in Hanoi in 2006 is available here, just as an example of the work I did. I was especially proud of how this report turned out.

But now all that seems so far in the past, and I'm moving into new directions in my life. I no longer have any desire to spend my limited energy fulfilling another person's vision, as I did for Mickey during all those years. Even though I retired in 2008, Mickey talked me into going to Skopje, Macedonia for one last meeting in April 2009, and it was so much work that I realized I just can't continue doing it any more. I needed that one last push to realize it's time to move into another phase of life.

I want to find out what I might be able to develop within my own sphere of influence, and this blog has helped me find my way to another aspect in my life. I was so busy and preoccupied during my working years that I never had the time or inclination to even wonder about these things. Now, it's like I'm standing at another threshold and taking stock.

Yesterday while I was on my Saturday morning walk with the Fairhaven walking group, I met a woman who has just returned from 18 months in China. She was there learning Mandarin. Although I didn't find out much else about her, it was enough for us to make a connection and share our experience of the vast differences in the culture between the United States and China. It made me realize that even though I have little desire to return to that part of the world, I am permanently changed by those experiences and cherish what I have learned. The old adage about travel broadening one's outlook is definitely true.

But I realize that there must be a time and a place for travel, and another time to reflect and contemplate the here and now. I am fortunate in my many memories of places I've been and people I've known. As I begin this new month of May, I'm feeling pretty happy about the present moment and a poem of Emily Dickinson's comes to mind.

How much the present moment means
To those who've nothing more —
The Fop — the Carp — the Atheist —
Stake an entire store
Upon a Moment's shallow Rim
While their commuted Feet
The Torrents of Eternity
Do all but inundate —

I am always struck by Emily's ability to use words to their full advantage. Since she wrote this poem in the middle of the nineteenth century, some of the words are no longer used in quite the same way, but "fop" still means someone who is overly concerned with their looks; "carp" refers to someone who continually finds fault with others, and "atheist" is one who believes God does not exist. The essence of this poem hits me deep within my heart and reminds me to look beyond every day to the torrents of eternity.

I wish you and yours a peaceful and reflective May.

Easter Sunday 2011

2011-04-24T06:44:00.000-07:00

St. Walburga nuns, 1992

As I wake in the darkness on Easter morning 2011, my thoughts are of the community of nuns that I knew in Boulder. I spent at least five Easter mornings with them. Meet the Benedictine Sisters of St. Walburga, a small group of contemplative nuns who used to host retreats at their abbey just outside of Boulder. They moved from Boulder to the farming community of Virginia Dale in 1997.

When I was growing up, moving frequently from place to place with my family, we never attended church. My parents were not religious in any sense. My father had been raised in a family that followed no faith that I am aware of, and Mama was raised as a Catholic. To marry my father she left the church and never spoke of it to me, that I remember anyway. My grandmother lived with us for a time and she never mentioned going to church. It was only the secular holidays of Easter and Christmas that we celebrated in the fashion that so many do these days: Christmas is presents and shopping for gifts to wrap and put under a Christmas tree, wondering what those presents with your name on them contain; and Easter was pretty dresses, baskets filled with hard-boiled eggs that we had dyed in pastel colors. There was never any mention about the meaning behind these two holidays.

In my late teen years, just after having graduated from high school, I discovered religion. My father was stationed at an air base near Albany, Georgia, and when we moved into our rented house, a priest from the nearby Episcopal Church, Fr. Shipps, came to welcome us to our home. He also was interested in finding out what church we belonged to. I don't remember what was said to him, but I remember promising to come and visit the church. It must have been the right time, I'm not sure what triggered it, but I became intensely interested in learning everything I could about Christianity and was baptized and became a member. I just looked on line to see if I could find that church from all those years ago, and I think it was St. Paul's that I joined. But what I remember more than anything is that I was like a hungry person sitting at a banquet table. I could not get enough information fast enough, reading the Bible every day, studying everything about my new religion and becoming convinced I was meant to join a convent. (I have never done things half way, but this new tangent was a bit extreme, even for me.) My parents were very concerned but would have allowed me to follow whatever direction I chose.

I know I wasn't really all that serious, looking back, because I perused information about several different Episcopal convents and looked for the most attractive habit to guide my choice. When fashion is your guide to a convent, you can't be all that serious. But instead of joining a convent, I met a young airman who caught my eye, and we began to date. You can't have both of those things, apparently. But all of that information and what happened to me is another story.

The religious conversion was real, however. I have called myself a Christian and attended several different churches over the years, but as I have grown older I realize that the internal journey is still in progress. Prayer has always been something I've received great solace from. My life has not been an easy one, and so many times there was nowhere else to turn. In the years I lived in Boulder, I found it important in my life to find times to spend in concentrated prayer and meditation. St. Walburga's convent gave me that opportunity.

I would take a vacation from work and head to the Convent on Wednesday of Holy Week. The nuns provided me with a little cabin of my own, furnished with a bed, a writing desk, and a chair. If I chose to have a completely silent and private retreat, they would have left a meal for me outside the door, but I decided to take my meals with the other retreatants. The Benedictine nuns have designated times for all things, following the offices of St. Benedict, and strict times for meals. When I entered the little dining hall, a place was set for each of us, and we ate in silence while we were read a passage from the Bible. We were allowed to chat after the meal was concluded. This was the only time I spoke to anyone for the entire five days. I went into the chapel to listen to the nuns gathering to sing their offices several times during the day.

On Thursday, the nuns washed the feet of the retreatants, and I was quite moved to find how this affected me. It was humbling to have this lovely cloistered nun performing the ritual, one of so many she followed every day of her life. Since I was spending my time in solitary prayer and meditation, perhaps this is one reason why it seemed so meaningful. Everything, including walking quietly on the grounds of the Convent, took on a different light.

Saturday before Easter was like no other day. It is the only day of the entire year that Mass is not performed. No one takes communion that day. Christ is dead and has not yet risen. The feeling of the nuns on Saturday was mournful and quiet. But just the opposite occurred on Sunday morning: they had been up all night baking cookies and breads, and each of us was presented with a beautiful basket filled with these freshly baked goodies. Not your traditional Easter basket of jelly beans and hard boiled colored eggs, but one that was filled with lovingly prepared treats.

The Sunday service was packed, with all the faithful residing in nearby Boulder pouring in, and it truly felt like a celebration. I would pack up and leave after the Sunday service, filled with gratitude and spiritually renewed. Each year for at least five in the mid-1980s I spent Holy Week with the nuns at St. Walburga, and I have thought of them with fondness many times during the following decades.

Today, sitting in bed with my dear husband gently sleeping next to me, with the sun's rays beginning to come through the window, I realize how blessed I am to have the life we share today. For Easter this year, we will dress in nice warm clothes and drive to a nearby lake and walk around it together. I will have time to take pictures and we will discuss things going on in our lives. We will both be contemplative in such a beautiful setting, listening to the birds sing and watching the ducks and geese swimming on the lake. It is the church I attend these days, and it's a good one.

But I am also aware of what the nuns are doing right now, how joyful they are, and what they gave me that will never leave me as long as I'm alive.

Getting older and wiser

2011-04-17T07:34:00.000-07:00

From Wikipedia entry on Sugar

This morning's New York Times Sunday Magazine has a fascinating article about sugar. You can read it here, but be forewarned: it's scary stuff. If you compare what is written in that article with the Wikipedia entry under the picture, you will first notice that Wikipedia has many references regarding the debate about whether sugar really is bad for you. The article has tipped me over the edge to write about it here. Maybe I can save the life of someone who is dear to me (my family, my loved ones, my readers).

Sugar and fat are such wonderful comfort foods, we all know that. I can think of carrot cake with cream cheese frosting and feel associations of love and happiness surrounding many events at home, work, and numerous social occasions. It's so deeply ingrained in me that I am not sure I can separate the two: eating the sweet cake and the cherished memories.

Every once in awhile over the years, I have gone on sugar fasts, dieting and watching everything I eat so that I can lose weight. I've always been a regular exerciser, or at least I have been as an adult. I took up jogging in my mid-thirties in order to lose weight and quit smoking, and it certainly helped. No one was more surprised than me when exercising became an indispensable part of my life.

Everything works when I put my mind to it and apply willpower to start down a path toward health. But it's impossible to keep up because it's just that: an external pressure exerted upon my willingness to attain some goal. It's not coming from within but from a desire to be healthy or thin or more socially acceptable. And so it falls away and I slip back into old habits. We all know the routine.

I finished reading Mindless Eating last week and gave the book to my friend Judy. This week I have a another book on my nightstand: The End of Overeating by David Kessler. Both of these books talk about why it's important to become aware of what we are doing when we put food in our mouths. What happens to us when we eat comfort foods mindlessly is hard to ignore.

Yesterday I must have seen at least two dozen morbidly obese people on the streets here in Bellingham. I remember being shocked when I first got here from Boulder over the sheer number of them, because people in Boulder tend to exercise more and eat better than they do here. I wondered why at first, but after having passed through a dreary and cold winter and springtime, there's no doubt that many of these people have grown so huge because of mindless eating, as well as eating lots of sugar and fat. One of the things the article in the NYT pointed out to me is that eating the wrong foods causes us to want to eat more of those same foods.

When I went to my doctor's office in January and found that I had gained ten pounds since last year's visit, I was not only surprised but puzzled, because I exercise regularly and watch what I eat. I decided I had to lose the weight because my cholesterol numbers were elevated, but I also noticed that my triglycerides were lower than last year's number, which is a good thing, I thought. Knowing that both of those numbers are related to one another, I asked the doctor what level of triglycerides is considered to be healthy. He explained that the lower the number, the better. There is no healthy level of triglycerides. This surprised me, because I assumed that it was only high triglycerides that are unhealthy, but I've learned that they are not usable by the body and must be broken down by pancreatic enzymes in order to be absorbed. When triglycerides are elevated, they cause all kinds of havoc in the body.

What I did was to begin writing down everything I eat on a calorie counting website. I did that for two months and lost the excess weight and now am trying to stabilize my weight by applying what I learned about how much food 1,800 calories actually is (the amount I need to eat to keep from gaining or losing). It's not much, really, but I've also changed the kinds and quality of the food I eat as well as limiting the calories. One thing I am certain about: empty calories of any kind should not only be prohibited, but any time I eat them I put myself at risk for disease. It's a strong incentive, not imposed from without, but from deep inside me that I feel the desire for change coming. I've seen too many friends and family suffering from something that can be relearned: what we eat is definitely under our control.

But first we have to gain awareness that something we have done mindlessly all our lives can be recognized as actually being under our control. If you read that article in the New York Times about sugar, it might be all you need to give you that incentive. I hope so.

Do you learn happiness?

2011-04-10T06:49:00.000-07:00

Allison and Lexie, March 2011

When I look at this picture of the beautiful smiling Lexie, it reminds me that she seems to be a naturally happy person. She doesn't fuss very often, loves to smile and laugh, and makes everyone around her smile, too. Not all babies are like that, I remember. I am now at the age that when I visit family, like I did last month, there are babies and little kids everywhere, usually two generations removed from me. I notice the difference in temperament between all of us, and I wonder whether some of us are born with a contentment gene.

I saw a movie yesterday that triggered this question in my mind: Another Year, a British film made last year that follows the life of a couple and their friends and family through four seasons. It's not a movie that could have been made in this country, as the plot is nonexistent; it just portrays the people and their relationships to one another. There were long moments without a sound track where we just watched the play of emotions across their faces. One of the characters, Mary, is a middle-aged co-worker who kept imagining that her life would take off and be different if only some imagined event (a new car, a new man) could transport her there. Her lack of self-awareness as to how much of her unhappiness is of her own making is something I recognize, both in my own life and in the lives of those around me.

Perhaps it has something to do with having been thrown into the crucible of family last month, but I couldn't help but think about how differently my relatives approach life. I guess this is to be expected, but we rarely have such an opportunity for reflection. And how much of what I see is real, and how much of it is my own projection onto my family? I cannot get outside of my own head, my own family dynamics, to see things as they might appear to outside observers. All I can do is examine how I feel and contemplate the inner workings of my own mind.

I think I was a happy baby and am a naturally happy person. But if something occurs in my life that causes me pain (either mental or physical), that event becomes the center of my existence for either a shorter or longer period, and everything else going on fades into the background. I suppose this is normal, but it amazes me how often I change my internal focus from one thing to another. Most of the time it is outside of what I think I can control, but sometimes I wonder. Watching Lexie or watching Mary (in the movie) in their differing approaches to life, I wonder if there is something I'm missing that would be obvious if I could only gain a different vantage point.

When my son was little, I read him stories from Winnie the Pooh by A.A. Milne. I especially liked the character of Eeyore, a sad donkey who always sees the world through the eyes of a confirmed pessimist. It always made me smile when I encountered his character, because it seemed that nothing could ever happen in Eeyore's life that wouldn't be terrible, and it wasn't the event, but the observer, who determined the outcome. Reading those stories gave me perspective enough to realize I might be able to change my life by changing my viewpoint, and that nothing outside of me would change until I changed my attitude.

This is one of the reasons I love to read well-written novels and memoirs, because reading gives me a different perspective through which to view the world, my own life, and the lives of those around me. When I think back to my twenties, I remember being transported and fundamentally changed by some of the books I read at that time. Going back and re-reading some of them was like reading them for the first time, because I was different, changed by the earlier reading of the story, and no longer either as receptive or innocent as the young girl who was my former self.

Happiness may not be a learned behavior as much as a choice one makes. Just as I bring my mind back again and again to one point in meditation, perhaps the trick to happiness is to choose it over and over.

Still in recovery mode

2011-04-03T06:31:00.000-07:00

The Sixlings, in order by oldest to youngest

It's Sunday morning, sitting here in my own bed with my cup of tea and laptop, preparing to write my usual Sunday post and thinking about the past week. Last Sunday I was sitting propped up with this same laptop in my brother's office on a very comfortable air mattress. The entire household was asleep, and this morning Smart Guy, the only other person in my apartment, is quietly sleeping. It's the best time of the day for me. The birds are beginning to wake outside but even they are mostly still asleep and the sun won't be coming up for another hour.

Last Wednesday was pretty grueling, starting out in Texas at 6:30 am and traveling home for the next fourteen hours, before Smart Guy picked me up at the Bellingham Airport. The shuttle bus took three hours from Seattle, and I saw standing water everywhere, from days and days of rain. Once home, I ate a little dinner and went to bed early. It felt so good to sink down into my own bed and fall asleep. I slept ten hours with nary a stir. Every night since returning home, I've needed more sleep than usual. The very first full day home, Thursday, I went hiking with the Senior Trailblazers and covered nine muddy miles, which I wrote about here.

Thinking about my family, who we are to each other, and how fortunate we are to continue to be well and with enough means to gather together as we did last week, brings two distinct and opposite feelings to mind. One, that it's already behind us and that moment in time may be captured in pictures and memories, but it's already past. The second feeling is the timelessness of being together. Even though I had not been with some of my siblings in years, as soon as we were together we connected as though no time had passed. Twenty years separate the youngest (Fia) from the oldest (me), and whether or not we are blessed with another gathering like this last one is yet to be seen. Fia already began discussing with me tentative plans for another gathering to celebrate her 50th and my 70th birthday in less than two years.

Frankly, that is almost too soon for me to contemplate! It seems like tomorrow, and I'll need at least a year to recover completely from this last one. That will change, though, as time passes and my life picks up as usual here in Bellingham. My first visit to the coffee shop on Friday was wonderful, with little two-year-old Leo seeing me arrive and rushing over with Thomas the Train for me to read to him, and Gene giving me a hug and letting me know how glad he is that I've returned. My usual spot in the aerobics class was still there, and this Sunday brings me closer to what has become normal. This post is included in the mixture.

My parents have been gone for a long time now, but their offspring are still alive, hearts still beating with our family's tendency to develop coronary artery disease (which took both Mama and Daddy) seemingly held at bay by statin drugs, which were unavailable to our parents. But still, when I think of it, something will cause the six of us to finally be unable to gather as we have done over the years. Just as last week's picture has two of our numbers missing, the fact of life is that it is ephemeral, everything born must die someday. But today, in April 2011, I feel the presence of my incredible family here in the same universe, and for that I am eternally grateful. I leave you this morning with a picture of the five sisters, taken last week by my brother Buz.

PJ, Fia, Norma Jean, Jan, Markee

Family

2011-03-27T05:26:00.000-07:00

Family reunion at our parents' home 1982

Taken almost thirty years ago, this picture shows our family and many of its offspring. The top row starting on the left, Pete and Norma Jean, and then Bob and my sister Markee standing next to them. My sister PJ's then-husband Ken and her two sons Joey and Jason surround Allison and my sister Fia in the next tier. Finally, the bottom five are my brother Buz holding his daughter Trish, me, and those two gorgeous hunks in the front are Peter, Norma Jean's son, and my long-gone son Chris.

At this moment in the early morning hours, I sit typing with my trusty laptop in the home of Buz and my sister-in-law Phyllis. Sleeping in the next room are Norma Jean, Allison and her daughter Lexie. Buz and Phyllis are asleep in their bed with their two little dogs Pixie and Bella. Counting me, we are eight souls starting our Sunday in Texas, on our way to a huge gathering on Tuesday of the siblings and our clan. This is all happening because Norma Jean has come to Texas to see her family after Pete's passing last month.

It is also the third trip I've taken in four months, with the longest hiatus in Florida with Norma Jean just a few weeks ago. I'm almost getting used to waking in a strange bed at all hours. I had barely gotten accustomed to being home when it was time to leave again. Hopefully when I return home on Wednesday, I won't need to be going anywhere for a while.

I arrived on Friday and had a chance to be with Buz and Phyllis for a day before Norma Jean, Allison and Lexie arrived yesterday afternoon. I went to bed early last night as usual and woke before everyone else, although I hear little Lexie beginning to make her morning sounds, so my Sunday will soon be consumed with family. Until then, however, I am thinking about the meaning of family.

The camera captured a moment in time that looks solid and real, but none of the people in that picture exists as they were then. Markee and Bob are parents to three teenagers now, and beautiful blond Fia is a grandmother, as is Norma Jean, and Allison (red and white shirt) is in her forties and the mother of a beautiful daughter. My son Chris died in 2002 of a heart attack. Peter is in Florida at Norma Jean's house dog-sitting and making home repairs. It's interesting that the person in the extreme upper left and extreme lower right are no longer alive, and I will always miss them both. It can't be helped, that's the way life is.

Family is important to me, I guess to most of us. Not many these days have as many siblings as I do, which makes for an incredibly large extended family. Years ago before the advent of email and the digital age, we sent around a family letter, with pictures and a hand-written or typed letter from each of us. When it came in the mail, you took your old letter out, read everyone's contribution and added a new one. Mama was still alive then and she also contributed a letter. This went on for a few years, before Pete decided to put together an electronic newsletter with everyone's contribution. We enjoyed that until Buz made us a private family blog on Wordpress, which he cleverly called "Sixlings," and everyone kept in touch there until the entire family joined Facebook. I now keep track of my extended family in that environment, complete with pictures and marveling at the exploits of my grand-nieces and -nephews.

At 68, I feel very fortunate to have the love and support of my five siblings and their families. We are all well and healthy enough to be able to gather here in Texas to celebrate and appreciate this moment in time, which is just that, a moment in time. I will capture it in pictures and will look at it in years to come, remembering this time and place, which will have moved on. My heart is full to overflowing with gratitude for this opportunity.

Reunion on the horizon

2011-03-20T06:31:00.000-07:00

I'm not exactly sure when this picture of me with my five siblings was taken, but I know Norma Jean had just rescued Radar, the dog in her arms, a month or so before. That should help to date the picture. It might be the last time we were all together, or not. It was a while ago. It might be in 2002 when we got together at Thanksgiving after my son Chris had died, but then again, maybe not. This time next Sunday, I will be in Texas and we will all be in close proximity once again. On the 29th, we will have a reunion at a restaurant in the area. Of course there will be plenty of cameras around, mine included.

In December of 2008, we were all in Texas except for Norma Jean. She and Pete stayed in Florida, and the rest of us gathered to walk a half marathon together. My sister Markee instigated that trip, and it was a good one in many respects. It sparked my desire to find a way here in Bellingham to find some sort of exercise that would require concerted effort over several hours. I found the Senior Trailblazers, which now provide a high point in my life, with every Thursday reserved for our hikes. In the winter we stay close to Bellingham, but in the summer months we carpool up to the Mt. Baker wilderness. We start at 8:00 in the morning and are sometimes not home before 4:00 pm or even later. I'm always tired and renewed at the same time. I treasure the friends I've made, as well as the familiarity with the beautiful mountains so close by. And it all started because of the need to train for a half marathon.

The three weeks I spent in Florida have now settled into their place in my memory, although Norma Jean and I spend a fair amount of time with the video chat feature we have on our iMacs. Now that I've been there, when we visit on line, I know exactly where she is and can easily slip myself into the room with her. I usually wait until I know she's got a glass of wine (it's three hours later there) and I can enjoy being with her at the beginning of her evening. Technology has changed things so much. It's almost as if I were sitting in the room with her, and even though our hugs are virtual, our tears are not. We can laugh and cry together for as long as we want.

My heart aches for her losses. Yesterday she cleaned up the motorcycle on which the three of them spent all those many hours and days together, in preparation for selling it. They covered somewhere around 70,000 miles on that motorcycle in just a few short years, and now Norma Jean is the only one left behind. She is struggling to find her way and figure out what she wants, for the first time in more than four decades. Or even more, really, since I remember telling her what she wanted as her big sister. And I felt I knew the answer, better than she knew herself.

I was a bossy person back then, always thinking I knew the answers to everything. My world was colored in bright certainty, with no shades of subtlety. I didn't even know the meaning of nuance. I can't help but cringe a little as I look back at the confident and imperious person I was then. I've grown, no doubt about it, and a lot of that growth has been accompanied by the pain of self-knowledge. Slowly, over the years and decades, I have come to realize there is truly no way one person can know what is good and right for another.

Norma Jean gradually morphed from being a shy and reticent teenager into the assertive, competent and powerful person she is today. She did that without my influence, too. She raised two wonderful kids and dealt with a creative and (in some ways) difficult husband. I know Pete would agree with that statement. And now she stands on the threshold of a new life. Next week's reunion is the last obligation she has to make to her family, as we gather next week to honor Pete's influence in our lives and open our hearts to our sister. I love you, Norma Jean.

Reentry and change

2011-03-13T06:50:00.000-07:00

Thich Nhat Hanh

My life is beginning to return to normal, after a fashion. There are permanent changes but they are not yet fully integrated into my mind and heart.

While I was in Florida, I was reading Thich Nhat Hanh's book, Peace Is Every Step: the Path of Mindfulness in Everyday Life. It is a deceptively simple book, but it calmed me and I spent some time thinking about the interconnectedness of all life. I am still reading the book, curiously unwilling to be done with it. He talks about "bells of mindfulness," seeing a red light when you are driving as a bell to remind you to return to the present moment, or any sound or light as a reminder to become peaceful. He is an 84-year old Vietnamese monk who has fascinated me for years. So nonviolent that he would not even strike a bell, he says he invites the sound of the bell to come out. You can see that in the picture. Whatever he is doing, he does it with his entire being.

I miss my sister much more than I thought I would, but it surprises me that I am so surprised. We started our lives together, and whenever we are in close proximity, our thoughts and lives begin to merge. It was so wrenching to be in the airport and start the process of moving away from her, away from our life of the past three weeks. The first few nights I woke in confusion, wondering where I was, but that has faded as I've gotten back into my usual routine and reconnected with my partner. I have also had the chance to video chat with Norma Jean and find it very much more comforting, now that I've spent so much time with her, it allows me to feel really connected.

As I wrote on my other blog, I had the thyroid biopsy on Friday and, although it wasn't exactly pleasant, it is done and behind me now. Next week I will hear what they found and am hoping for good news. The practice of mindfulness and coming to terms with my fear has also been helping me integrate the experience. Today I think I'll go to the Y and swim laps in the pool, hoping that I will be able to add that exercise to my current practice of aerobic classes, hiking, and walking. It will also allow me to feel connected to Norma Jean in yet another way.

In less then two weeks I will travel to Texas to be with my family for five days, and I'll see Norma Jean, Allison and Lexie again. It will be the first time that all six of us siblings will be together since 2002, when they all came at Thanksgiving after my son Chris had died. We will be having a family reunion of sorts, with such an extended group there will be some who won't be present, but the "sixlings" will all be there. My sister Markee is flying in from Alberta without her family, just to see Norma Jean again and allow us all to be together. As the oldest, me, is nearing seventy, I hope that it won't be the last time. It's amazing that although both of our parents died in their sixties, we are all still here. I am grateful.

I can hear rain outside, just a light patter, nothing like the huge rains I saw in Florida. Yesterday, however, when I thought about going on the Saturday walk, it was a downpour with a howling wind. I decided to skip it, since I was also still feeling quite sore from Thursday's long hike with the Trailblazers. Today, after a good night's sleep, I finally feel rested and raring to go. After this Sunday morning meditation, my world feels bright with possibility.

Creatures of habit

2011-03-06T07:01:00.000-08:00

It's amazing to me that I got up this morning and talked with Norma Jean over coffee for an hour or so, read my usual blogs through Google Reader, went to the pool and swam 36 lengths, came home and took the dogs for a walk, all without even the slightest recollection of the fact that it's Sunday morning and I hadn't written my usual post here on the Eye! Here's why:

Norma Jean with Babe and Chester

We not only have adopted a dog for Norma Jean (Babe), but she has taken in a dog as a foster mom, Chester, a "junk yard" chihuahua (meaning mostly chihuahua but with something else mixed in). Babe is just under ten pounds, and Chester is just over. They fill the house with love, and wait in the window when we go outside and howl with delight when Norma Jean drives up after going out for errands.

Although you can't see it in this picture, both tails are wagging with anticipation of her return. It makes both her and me happy to see the life added to this house. When Allison and Lexie left last Monday, we decided on Tuesday to head to the pound to rescue a dog and returned with Babe. I wrote about it here.

We grew up with dogs and cats all around us, and although I have owned cats in the past, Smart Guy never had any pets during his childhood. When I started skydiving, I spent so much time away from home that it never occurred to me to become a pet owner. But Norma Jean has always had a dog, and although she really grieves over the loss of each one, she gains a huge amount of enjoyment from their unconditional love. When I return home Tuesday, I realize that the feeling of pet ownership I feel now will fade away as the plane takes off and I turn my thoughts toward home. Maybe one day I will own a cat again, but not while I'm feeding the wild birds!

The real benefit I've received here, other than connecting with Norma Jean again during this terribly hard period, is learning to use swimming as a form of exercise. As I swam in the pool this morning, I realized the true meditative aspect as I breathed out my nose into the water and in through my mouth as I took a breath every other stroke. Even counting laps is meditative. I was able to swim 36 lengths, a true half mile, before stopping and getting into the hot tub. I wrote about my breakthrough in swimming laps here.

My visit has been beneficial in other ways, too. Learning to be with my sister as an adult, I flashed a few times on the two of us walking the dogs this morning. I saw a possible future of us together as little old ladies with our swimming and our doggies living in a retirement community like so many seniors do. But of course I still have Smart Guy around, and if genetics has anything to say about it, he will outlive me by many decades.

Which makes me think of the thyroid biopsy I will have when I return home. Before I write in here next, I will have it behind me. The appointment is on Friday the 11th. Although they didn't consider a biopsy before, once they did a second ultrasound, I received a call from the doctor's office suggesting it. Fortunately I have the ability to see the results of the ultrasound on line, and once I read it and noticed the word "hypoechoic" describing the nodule, I of course looked it up online. It means that the largest nodule sends a different sort of echo in the ultrasound and so they will follow up with a biopsy. This means I will know without any doubt what is going on with my thyroid. So I should be happy but I am a bit apprehensive.

I think it will be a little lonely here once I leave, but the doggies will help immeasurably, and in less than a month we will all be together again in Texas for a few days to have a family reunion. This was promised when the family decided not to descend on Florida after Pete died. I will leave Washington again on March 25 for five days to attend, and then I will probably not travel anywhere too far away for a while. I need to rediscover my own beautiful part of the country, as well as reconnect with a certain missing element in my life, my partner.

Skydiving, swimming, and sunshine

2011-02-27T03:00:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I had a really full day in the Florida sunshine. It started with swimming 20 laps in the community pool here at Betmar Acres with my sister Norma Jean. She swims anywhere from 42 to 54 laps and I feel quite intimidated trying to keep up. I haven't swum laps in a pool for thirty years, but I found that once I had good goggles and ear plugs, I could manage to swim several laps before I had to stop to catch my breath. I don't remember how to pace myself quite yet. Today I'll try to swim ten before having to stop. Going slow and steady is the trick.

Then my friend Jennifer, who jumps at Skydive Snohomish with me and Smart Guy and hasn't jumped for two months, is in Florida to attend a conference and joined me at Skydive City here in Zephyrhills for two skydives yesterday. The sun was almost too intense, the weather being more than five degrees warmer than normal and more humid. We were both sweating as we walked to the plane and went up into the cool, clear air at altitude. It was a wonderful day, and we made two fun skydives together. That's her on the right, me on the left in the above picture, coming back after our first jump.

The funny thing is, I was more apprehensive about the swimming activity, since it is not a very comfortable and well known pursuit, and skydiving tends to be much more familiar, with me having accumulated more than 65 hours of freefall time. I know it might seem odd to those who don't skydive (the vast majority of people), but I look forward to learning and remembering how to breathe, stroke, and exercise while in water as a new and exciting skill. It's so fascinating for me to watch Norma Jean and her morning companion, 80-year-old Midge, swim constantly for almost an hour without stopping. And I can continue this activity once I return home, since the YMCA has an Olympic sized pool.

If I had the wherewithal to maintain two residences, one in Bellingham and one in Zephyrhills, I might consider it to be close to Norma Jean and Skydive City during the winter months. But frankly, I'd miss the snowshoe trips with the Senior Trailblazers and my gym companions very much. Not to mention Smart Guy, because in no scenario in my mind do I see this being a place where he would be comfortable. So, perhaps I will come to visit Norma Jean for a couple weeks in the dark of winter and spend time swimming with her, sharing together, and making a few skydives, just to keep my knees in the breeze. That makes sense, doesn't it?

I've been here in Florida for ten days now, and it is amazing to me how my life in Bellingham has slipped into the background. While the sun shines here and I sit in air-conditioned comfort in Zephyrhills, the wind blows and sub-freezing temperatures in Bellingham keep Smart Guy inside and the birds eating us out of house and home. I have another ten days here. I plan to enjoy it all to the max, and once I head back to Washington state and we circle Seattle's Space Needle in the airplane, this place with all its warmth and sun will recede and become a cherished memory.

Norma Jean has not yet found a new dog, although she has been looking. She wants to rescue a chihuahua or two on her way to wholeness. We will have accomplished that before I leave, I hope. Then I will be joining her and the rest of my family in Texas for a week at the end of March so that the rest of the family can reach closure about Pete's passing and mark the shift in the family dynamics. Little Lexie will also meet her Texas relatives, too. It's a full time in my life and in the life of all the Stewarts.

Florida Stewarts

2011-02-20T03:00:00.000-08:00

Although the reason for me being here in Florida is difficult, the family visiting is wonderful. Here's Allison reading to Lexie, who is now eight months old. She's a delight to behold, to play with, to help in healing all the loss this family is feeling right now. For those who don't already know, a quick rundown of why I came to Zephyrhills, Florida: my brother-in-law Pete who has been sick with emphysema for almost a decade went downhill quickly in a few weeks and died on February 10, a week after his 67th birthday. Then last Tuesday my sister's little long-haired chihuahua was hit by a car in her front yard and killed. The three of them were inseparable. Now Norma Jean is the one left behind, and when I heard about Moose (their dog), well that was it, I had to get on a plane and come to join Norma Jean with her daughter Allison and son Peter.

Today is the celebration of Pete's life, a two-hour reception for the friends and family to reminisce and share Pete's passing with some of those who love him. Most of the Stewart family lives in Texas, and Norma Jean will be going there in the near future for a week or so to be with our brother and sisters who live in that area. They love Pete too and are honoring her wish not to be inundated with family during this time. We are close in age and were, as I wrote in my post last week, constant companions as we were growing up. I was given the go-ahead by Norma Jean to come and be with them.

I'm so glad to be here, but I would give anything for the circumstances to be different. Much different. While Pete's passing was expected, Moose's was not. She is unable to sleep because every time she wakes up she relives the scene of the car taking another part of her life away. She is more than devastated and it breaks my heart several times a day to see the intense grief she is experiencing, both her life partner gone, and her little six-pound bundle of unconditional love... gone, too.

Her son Peter decided to fence in the back yard with a dog run in anticipation of Norma Jean's next dog, which we all hope will be sooner rather than later. When she decides to go to Texas, Peter will come back here to Florida and do some much-needed work around the house as well as dog-sit for his mother. She has already been on the local dog rescue websites looking to find the right one.

Here Norma Jean and Peter are working on the fence, doing what is necessary to keep the mind occupied with tasks in order to wear out the body so sleep will finally come. (Norma Jean is preparing the poles, those are not crutches.) Yesterday, Norma Jean woke in the middle of the night and was unable to get back to sleep. I got up at 4:00 am and saw she was awake, so I joined her and we talked until the sun brightened the early morning sky. I will post some pictures on my other blog after today's gathering so that my family members will be able to be there in spirit.

I know that the grief is normal. I've waded through whole pools of it myself (to paraphrase Emily Dickinson) and know that the only way forward is on the sharp jagged shoals of pain. But the family is strong, and Norma Jean is going to make it through to the other side. She won't be the same, none of us ever are after the loss of loved ones, but I'm so blessed to be here and experiencing it along with her, Allison, and Peter. I'll be here until the 8th of March, so I've got time to spend in the glorious Florida sunshine and soak up the healing rays with Norma Jean.

Constant companions

2011-02-13T06:24:00.000-08:00

When we were growing up, Norma Jean and I were together most of the time. She's here on the left and I'm on the right. I was the older sister and tended to torment her now and then. I thought that was what older sisters were supposed to do. We are a little more than two years apart in age, the first- and second-born in what would eventually grow to be a large family. But our next sibling didn't arrive until I was seven, so for five long child years, we were our parents' only children.

From the beginning, we were very different. I was extroverted and adventurous, and Norma Jean was introverted and shy. They say that birth order is important in the development of personality, but I know that from the very beginning, we approached life from very dissimilar vantage points. It made our interactions predictable, though: she was my little sister and as we explored our world, I would often imperiously make decisions for both of us, and she would look up to me as her big sister.

One thing that grew out of our interaction is that I learned to enjoy an audience, finding her introverted personality easy to manage... that is, until Norma Jean figured out how to torment me back! She knew what I loved and when she was given something that I coveted, she would quietly withhold it until she had extracted concessions from me. I think in growing up, we both learned to appreciate the other's differences and how to use them to our advantage.

Almost every one of the most important people in my life have been introverts, as we fall into a comfortable and known dynamic that started with Norma Jean. Smart Guy is as far on the introvert scale as one can go, while Norma Jean married an extroverted guy, Pete. They started their life together in what must have been a similar dynamic for them. We grew apart in the years that followed our marriages, moving to different parts of the country, but whenever we would see each other, the time apart would fall away and we would be together again as though the years apart had never happened. They changed nothing.

Norma Jean was the first family member I called when Chris died. I still remember her voice on the other end of the phone, and she was there for me one hundred percent. I had to hear my sister's voice to share my grief, to make it real to me. That was in 2002 and, although we didn't see each other at that time, I needed to be reminded of her presence in the world to find any comfort. We saw each other during the following Thanksgiving in a family gathering in Texas, where most of our siblings reside.

Now Norma Jean is a widow, Pete having died this last Thursday of pulmonary emphysema. It was expected, he was able to make peace with and say goodbye to all of us who loved him, but Norma Jean is now bereft. She is a strong person, nobody knows that better than me. She has her son Peter and daughter Allison with her, surrounding her and buoying her up.

I talked with her yesterday, uncertain as to how I might best help her during this time and wishing I could simply hold her hand and allow our tears to mingle. She said she would think about what she wants me to do and is considering a trip to Texas where we would all reunite in the most gentle way possible. At first all of us Stewarts wanted to descend on her at once, but now that our family consists of six siblings with all the concomitant family members, it just didn't make any sense. I think we as a family have come to an awareness that the right thing to do is to let her decide when, where, and how.

Norma Jean is a natural caregiver, and during the last decade or so, she was Pete's rock. His illness dictated many aspects of her life. She traveled a great deal during the last few years of her working life, while he stayed home and kept in touch with her using Apple's iChat feature, and she spent many a night in a hotel room by herself. I think in many ways that forced separation showed her what it would be like when Pete was gone, and her strength of character will carry her to a new place in her life. I have no doubt that it will be a good place.

When we were both small enough to fit into the kitchen sink together, we shared everything. We still do, really, because our lives are intertwined right at the soul level, and nothing that happens to one of us fails to impact the other. I am so grateful to have my sister's love and she knows without a doubt that she has mine.

Making progress

2011-02-06T06:55:00.000-08:00

From Yoga Body

I found the perfect meditation bench this week. For many years when I meditated, I used a futon and zabuton as the person pictured here on the left is doing. What I discovered when I decided to take up meditation again is that my knees are very unhappy when I bend them out to the side and sit cross-legged. I don't know when it happened, but I remembered that I had once used another person's meditation bench and found it quite comfortable, as your knees fold under the bench. I called a few yoga places around town and was told of a local artist who makes these benches. Eberhard met me at a local store and let me try out several of his already made benches, and I found a lovely cherry wood bench that fits me exactly.

It's much easier for me to keep my back straight when my knees are pointed downwards and not bent out to the side. After finding an appropriate place to sit in my apartment, I gave it a try and found it very easy to begin again the practice of sitting. I figured I'd build up five minutes at a time, but the five minutes became a quarter of an hour without any effort. I'm looking forward to building this into my daily life. The technique I use is to follow my breath, bringing my wandering mind back again and again to the breath. Years ago I used a mantra, but somehow it doesn't feel right to me today; maybe I need another one. There are several places here in Bellingham where I can go to sit with others, if I feel the need, and my little bench is quite portable.

I got the blood work back and found that my thyroid is functioning within normal parameters. The TSH (thyroid stimulating hormone) number is on the low end, and a bit lower than when it was measured two years ago, but the new doctor is reassuring about the lump most likely being a benign cyst. My worries about it have been greatly reduced, and now I think I can stop focusing on what is wrong in my life and start thinking about what is right and positive. Yesterday I wrote a post on my other blog about the trials my brother-in-law Pete and my sister Norma Jean are going through right now. He's been signed up for Hospice and has been given only a few days or weeks to live. However, Pete is wanting to defy the odds and hang on for as long as possible. Pulmonary emphysema is a real killer, but it doesn't follow an orderly pattern. The doctors are convinced he won't be around much longer, but the atmosphere in their home and his positive attitude amaze me. I think he's found a way to squeeze out every last drop of life, and I'm so proud of him.

I notice how quickly I formulate consistent patterns in my daily life, and it's interesting to see how these patterns (like writing this post every Sunday morning) give me a sense of security. Every week day I get up at the same time as when I was working and begin my day. The scary part of retirement for many people is not to have any reason to get up, and I found it scary, too. But it isn't in me not to have a place to go, something to do with my day, a sense of purpose. My days are full and varied, and there are activities stacked up waiting for me to find the time for them, if I want.

Some people, like my partner, need lots of unstructured time to create, whereas I am just the opposite. I wonder if it's something inherent within a person or a learned behavior. It rarely occurs to me that I don't have to get up at the time I do, that I don't have to take the bus to town to my local coffee shop and gym, it's just what I do during the week. It's been almost three years now, and it feels just right to me. Every Thursday is reserved for my Senior Trailblazer hikes, and whether it's raining or the sun is shining, I look forward to it with real pleasure. Every Saturday now I walk with the Fairhaven Walkers group and have coffee with the other walkers afterwards. Once the skydiving season begins again, I'll head down to Snohomish on Saturday or Sunday to spend time jumping out of airplanes with the dear friends I've made there.

Yes, I'm making progress in my life. There's no actual place to get to, or through, or around. The days show up predictably and comfortably, and I make my way through each one. My life partner shares these days with me, and mostly he goes his way and I go mine, but the sense that he is attuned to me, that we are attuned to each other, adds the final thread to completion. I am not alone on this journey, I have the love and support of my family and friends to buoy me up and allows me to soar. This must be what is meant by happiness.

Thinking about my thyroid

2011-01-30T07:00:00.000-08:00

Sometimes I really wonder if I have a guardian angel who helps to arrange events in my life. This week, completely by accident, I learned that I have a lump in my thyroid gland. I mentioned this on my other blog, but I give myself permission here to deal with my thoughts and feelings in depth.

It all started with the carotid ultrasound that was ordered by my new young doctor, who does inspire confidence in me because of the way he treated me, like a colleague, interested and curious. He was concerned about the ten pounds that I had gained since last year and the rise in my cholesterol levels. With my family history of coronary artery disease, he told me that a noninvasive look at the carotids would give him an idea of the condition of my coronary arteries, as blockage in one is usually also indicative of blockage in others. I remember being secretly glad because I had never had one before and I hoped that if there really were something going on in my neck, it would show up.

For the last few months, when looking down and to the left with my chin tucked in, I thought I felt something in my neck, but since I couldn't actually feel anything after probing, it was a bit of relief that he would be taking an ultrasound in that general area. The ultrasound technician was a big gorgeous hunk of a man who was personable and very helpful. After taking pictures of the right side, he moved over to the left and almost immediately told me that he saw an anomalous lump in my thyroid and said he would take a few extra pictures. I asked him what it was likely to mean, and he said that my doctor would probably order some blood work and possibly a biopsy, but not to worry. I said, "Well, if I got any kind of cancer, I suppose thyroid would be best since it's the slowest to grow." He said that even if it were cancerous, it might not bother me for years. I knew all this from a friend who did develop thyroid cancer in her thirties. It was removed and she takes thyroid medication daily.

I was a bit thrown for a loop. He showed me a picture of the lump when I asked; it is perfectly round and 1.1 centimeters in size. No wonder I could feel it. Driving home from the appointment, I was so distracted I missed my turn and got temporarily lost. That was my first clue that I was really worried. However, once I reached my trusty computer and looked up information on the internet, I learned that thyroid nodules are usually NOT cancer and that many people, especially women, develop them over the years. That was a relief.

The very next day I received a call from my doctor's office telling me that my carotid arteries are in very good shape. Waiting expectantly for the next part, I was floored to find that nothing in the radiologist's report even mentioned the thyroid lump! I told her what I had seen and been told by the technician, and she said they would order pictures from the lab and would get back to me. As of today, I have been scheduled on February 11 for another "enhanced" ultrasound of my thyroid, and the promised blood work has already been drawn.

What if the technician had not mentioned what he saw? It makes me realize how important it is not to remain in the dark about my health, to be proactive, and to follow up with health issues instead of hoping things are not what I suspect. My mother was somewhat of a hypochondriac, but it saved her life when she insisted that the lump under her arm was not right, although she had no lump in her breast. A biopsy showed it was a very virulent form of breast cancer (inflammatory) and she was treated and survived, when only 5% of patients with that particular cancer do. I should have mentioned the sensation in my neck, but it was so nebulous I didn't even think of it when I chatted with Dr Whitehead.

So, there you go, my guardian angels were busy thinking how I might discover this nodule and become aware of the health issues going on in my body. If I had not gotten a new physician because of the need to change insurance carriers, if he had not ordered the ultrasound, if the technician had not mentioned what he saw and shared it with me... all of these decision paths followed to bring me sitting here in the dark on Sunday morning, writing about it, hopeful that it will be benign, but preparing myself for whatever the truth of it is.

Gently going into that good night

2011-01-23T07:10:00.000-08:00

My son Chris and me in 1966

Ever since Emily died last month, the whole concept of loss, grief, and death have been uppermost in my mind. Seeing my new doctor and talking with him about the cholesterol problem that caused the loss of my son when he was forty only magnified these thoughts. I think maybe I can use this vehicle to explore my own feelings a little. I hope you won't find it too depressing, but I need to go there.

Dr Whitehead is a very young-looking 36 years old, engaged and interested in his profession. He must deal with a fair amount of grief and loss every day, so it must be possible to come to terms with it. I notice that I usually submerge my feelings of loss until an event brings them up again. Frankly, though, loss and grief are part of the package when we come onto the scene here on Earth.

Long ago I thought about the fact that I would not live forever, but when you are young and have not experienced massive loss firsthand, it's all academic and doesn't carry much weight. I remember using the phrase "the rest of my life," which seemed infinite, and in a way it was, stretching out as far as my mental eye could see. Then at 22, my first really big loss occurred when my baby Stephen died of spinal meningitis. Devastated beyond belief, that event changed my life's direction forever. But I did recover. I still remember the day I was watching an infant and realized that I no longer averted my eyes from his beautiful baby's smile of delight. I was smiling back. It had been ten years.

Now I am childless, with Chris gone for almost a decade now, my parents both having died in their sixties, and now I am two years away from the Biblical life span of threescore and ten (seventy). That seems incredibly premature now, but it's not, really. I know I have lived most of my life and that going into that night is somewhere not in the distant future. I wonder how I want to go. Emily died suddenly and so prematurely that it still seems unreal. Not that way. Not in a parachuting accident, or car accident, or anything so... truncated. Not having the time to say goodbye, to make arrangements, to face the event.

My father's heart attack put him into the hospital for three days before he died. All six of his children came home to see him, to say goodbye before he "popped off," as he put it. His heart had been severely damaged and there was little hope, and he knew it. His last words to us were, "I love you all."

Mama had so much illness and pain in her life, and her final heart attack followed so many others, all of which she had pulled through. None of us thought it was the end, but Mama knew. Every one of us came to see her, and she went through her jewelry box and furs and gave them all away. She was in bed, sitting up and looking like her old self, but she knew it was time. I wonder what it is that lets us know? Will I know? She slipped into a coma for a few days, but suddenly she rallied and for a few precious hours she again was lucid and herself. She said God had let her come back to say her goodbyes.

That's an interesting word, "goodbye." It means so many things to me, and I am not exactly friends with that word, but a good bye is something to wish for. I have not had any family members die lingering and painful deaths from cancer, and I hope I never do. Now that I think about it, dying of heart disease might not be such a bad way to go. To me, the heart is the seat of emotion, the place I carry memories of those who have gone on ahead, the place that carries my core beliefs about life and love.

And the heart breaks, and the heart heals, and sometimes, the heart knows the future. Whenever it comes, I do want to go gently into that good night.

Monkey mind

2011-01-16T06:51:00.000-08:00

Years ago I heard of the concept of "monkey mind" when I was learning to meditate on a daily basis. I guess it would be a good thing to start the practice again, as my mind right now is all over the place. Scattered here and there with my thoughts. Last night I tossed and turned thinking about things and wondered what I would write about this morning. It will be a mishmash, for sure, because that's what my mind is doing. When I decided to take the word "mindfulness" for my New Year's Resolution, this was NOT what I was thinking about. Here goes:

For one thing, I can't meditate like I once did because I can no longer sit in lotus position, or even cross-legged with my back straight because my knees won't take it. At all. Maybe I should look for one of those kneeling stools so I can try sitting again. At one time I sat for an hour every day, a half hour morning and evening, and sometimes I would go into such an altered state that I would realize that more than an hour had passed and it seemed timeless, just very peaceful and calm. It carried over into the rest of my day, and if for some reason I missed a session I would look forward to the next one with anticipation.

On Wednesday I see a new doctor for my regular annual checkup. With the change in the Medicare Advantage plans this past year, the plan I was using was dropped by the Center for Senior Health where I was enrolled. So this year I am going to another part of PeaceHealth, the PeaceHealth Medical Center. In some ways I'm happy to be seen by a young doctor who is possibly more up to date on the latest medical advantages, rather than a geriatric specialist. In deciding which doctor to choose, I looked him up on the Internet and found that he's only been practicing for three years but had several rave reviews from previous patients. I didn't have the choice of a woman doctor, which is the only down side of this guy who looks to be fourteen or so in his picture.

In anticipation of the appointment, I had a liver and lipid profile taken from my blood. With the Peacehealth system, I can find the results of my tests on line almost immediately, and what I saw was both good and bad: my total cholesterol is up significantly since last year, which means I will need to take a higher dose of a statin drug. Hypercholesterolemia runs in my family. My parents both died in their sixties from heart disease, as did my son at forty, so I don't take these numbers lightly. After a short period of feeling depressed, I called my sister to commiserate with her. She reminded me that she has taken a powerful dose of a statin drug for more than half of her life, while it wasn't until I was in my mid-fifties that I had to start them. Every one of my siblings takes statins, which were not available to my parents.

The good news was that my "good" cholesterol had also gone up, making the totals still putting me at less-than-average risk for heart disease. And my triglycerides were way down on the low side of normal, so that was heartening. I wonder what he will say about all this, although I am prepared for an increase in dosage.

I have gone to see a couple of really good movies in the past few days. In fact, "The King's Speech" was so good that I will take Smart Guy to see it tomorrow, and I'm actually looking forward to a second viewing as I tend to get so involved in the story that I miss a lot of interesting parts. I awoke in the middle of the night after seeing it, thinking about it, and of course I went on line to see how historically accurate the movie was. I was pleased to find that the relationship between Prince Albert and his speech therapist was very accurate, and there were only a few issues dealing with other characters and their relationship to Hitler that were not entirely accurate. If you don't know the story, in the late 1930s, Prince Albert was forced to take the throne and become King George VI and had to deal with his debilitating stutter in order to lead Britain during wartime. It's the story of how he overcame it. I found the movie to be wonderful and inspiring.

Then yesterday, after finding nobody to go see "The Fighter" with me, I went alone. It's another historical movie, this time about Micky Ward, a prize fighter, and his relationship with his amazingly dysfunctional family. I had read about the performances of four people who will most likely receive a nomination for their parts: Mark Wahlberg, who plays Micky; Christian Bale, who plays his crack-addicted brother; Amy Adams as Micky's girlfriend; and Melissa Leo as his mother. They were all outstanding performances, and I'm glad I saw the movie, although I am not a fan of boxing. I also went online to find out the historical accuracy and learned that Micky Ward retired from boxing in 2003 and was very successful. If you can call having your brains knocked around in your cranium so often that you had to be hospitalized after some of your bouts being successful, that is.

So that's where my monkey mind has been scurrying and scampering around these days. Hopefully I will return to more serenity in the near future, once my fears about the new doctor have been laid to rest and I am able return to a more contemplative existence. I'll look into finding that kneeling stool. Until then, I hope you remain well and happy. Until next week...

More skydiving dreams

2011-01-09T06:15:00.000-08:00

Last night I dreamed again about skydiving. I figure it must be because of my recent trip to Colorado and seeing all my old friends and remembering what it was like to have skydiving in the center of my life. In the 1990s and beyond, everything else was peripheral, including my job and any relationships I had at the time.

I took up video for awhile, since I really wanted to do something other than teach all the time and I wasn't really interested in competing myself. I figured it would be fun to film others who wanted to compete in four-way events, so I was happy to get the camera equipment and find out how to do it myself. It was a lot of fun, except there are some problems when you are trying to video people who are competing: you must be sure to show each separation and the grips that are taken. Four-way competition requires the camera person to fly high above the formation and at a fairly steep angle. As I was learning, I was told to keep getting higher and steeper on them until I finally was in danger of falling on them! It was fun to learn, and I did actually get close enough to fall on my teammates one time.

In my dream last night I had decided to give camera flying another shot, for some friends who needed me to help them out. I pulled out my old equipment and my little portable TV for viewing the pictures and was suddenly aware that all my equipment is completely out of date! Who uses video tapes any more? Everything is now digital, and I didn't have any of it, so as I was waking up out of my dream, I reluctantly decided it wasn't a good idea to get back into camera flying. It was as real to me as writing in this blog is right now. For some reason my dreams lately have been very vivid and realistic, not fantastic like they sometimes are.

My rational mind tells me that I am processing the trip to Colorado and that it's a normal evolution in my consciousness, letting go of that part of my life and becoming more at peace with what my life is today, perhaps. I'm not sure, but I do know that dreams have helped me in the past. They help me with loss, because every once in awhile I am reunited with loved ones who are gone, and in the most real and satisfying ways, too.

Years ago I studied Carl Jung and became fascinated with his view of the collective unconscious. He posits that we all have certain archetypes in common that are present throughout all cultures. My own personal unconscious comes out in my dreams, with strong overtones of the collective myths and desires of every mother who has lost a child. So even though it's possible that my dreams aren't actually REAL, they perform every task that I might require of them: remembrance, interaction, delight.

And just in case I wanted to take up camera flying again, I guess I'll have to update my equipment. You know, I would probably be the first 68-year-old woman to do it. I have to smile when I think of my dream in the light of day, but hey, it was my dream.

P.S.: when I wrote this post in the morning (it's 1:30 pm now), I looked around in my pictures for a scene of a four-way skydive, and I found this one a friend posted today on his Facebook page. I asked him if I took it, because I vaguely remember this skydive, and since I wasn't in it, I figured maybe I was the photographer! Neither of us remembers for sure, but here it is:

The camera angle is steep enough to see all the grips, which is how they count points. I thought you might enjoy this little synchronicity.

Resolutions

2011-01-02T06:34:00.000-08:00

Before I turned a year old, this picture was taken of me. If I look closely, I can still see the person I am today in that face. Mama had lovingly combed my hair in the baby style of the day, and I was obviously well fed and happy. Sometimes I wonder how different my life would have been if I had not believed that the entire world adored me and would protect me from any harm, because of the enormous outpouring of love I received from my doting parents and extended family.

I've learned that every seven years not one part of your body remains the same; everything is eventually replaced by new cells, even down to your bones, which are alive and continue to grow during your entire life. So who is that little person, really? Is it me? How do our memories and sense of self continue on through our lives? I know some people who say they can remember crawling and beginning to walk (although I have no memory of such things). Life is truly a mystery. That little person has now been reconstituted almost ten times, if you think about it.

But it's still me. And now as I begin a new year, along with all my friends and family, I've been pondering the need to make some resolutions. I'm sure that little baby had no need for them, but I sure do. There is always something that I feel needs to grow and change within me so that I can become a better person, and resolving to change something that needs changing is what some of us do at the beginning of a new year. This auspicious year, filled with ones and elevens, seems especially appropriate for thinking of changing a way of being in the world. I've decided to make my New Year's Resolution to be one word that I can bring into many aspects of my life: Mindfulness.

Being mindful means becoming aware or conscious of different aspects of my life. I have decided that the first step is to become more mindful of how I eat my food, sitting down and actually having a meal instead of making a hurried sandwich and gobbling it down while in front of the TV or computer. This should help me lose a pound or two, since I know that food is much more nourishing to body and soul when you pay attention to what you are eating. I'll try not to beat myself up too much if I don't adhere to this every day, but mindful attention is what I'm looking to achieve.

I want to be mindful of my blessings. The loss of my friend Emily so suddenly really knocked me for a loop, making me realize anew how precious life is, reminding me to be thankful in this moment for my partner and my family. My extended family, you, are also very important to me and provide the intellectual stimulation that would be missing from my life without you, without blogging, without the community of like-minded souls whose lives I share every day.

The idea of a one-word resolution comes from one of my blogging friends who chose the word "shed" last year and rid herself of many parts of her life that had become cumbersome. This year she chose "nourish" as a reminder to give herself the things that help her to grow in the ways she would like. It is so easy for me to drift along from day to day, following the same patterns of my daily life without conscious thought. I'd like to nourish my soul and maybe help others along the way.

It's easy to decide on a resolution but not so easy to figure out how to put it into practice. One way to begin is to state the intention, which I'm doing here, and then think of a concrete step I can take every day to remind me (such as sitting down at the table for every meal), and then take it slow and steady. It takes about a month to change a habit, so the first few weeks will take some effort, but it should not be difficult to take small steps forward.

As I sit here in the dark, before the sun comes up on the second day of the new year, I look around the room at the environment I've created for myself: a laptop warming me as I sit propped up in bed, my partner softly breathing beside me, a cup of hot tea within arm's reach, a tapestry on the wall across from me that I brought back from some long-ago visit to a foreign country. A pervasive sense of peace steals across me. Gratitude is not hard to find in my life, but paying attention to it, becoming mindful of the present moment, is my resolution for the coming year.

Home again

2010-12-26T07:08:00.000-08:00

After I learned a week ago today that Emily was gone, I purchased tickets to travel back to Boulder. Because it was Christmas week, the best fares I could find were to travel on the 21st and return on Christmas Day. Any other days would have ratcheted up the cost too much. Smart Guy got up with me at 4:30am on Tuesday and drove me to catch the airport shuttle taking me 100 miles south to the SeaTac Airport. My flight to Denver was uneventful, and I stayed with Sarah and Josh, two skydiving friends who were the bests hosts anybody could have asked for. They have a small menagerie of animals: three cats, a dog, three parrots, and numerous fish tanks. I wrote about their home on my other blog here.

On the day of the memorial service, we were all three of us in a pretty emotional state as we traveled to Mile-Hi Skydiving, where Emily died, and where almost six hundred people had gathered to honor her. If it had not been Christmas week, there would have been more, but although three hundred chairs were set up in the enormous airplane hangar, there were literally hundreds standing in the back, on the sides, trying to find a place to hear her huge extended family tell funny and poignant stories about their beloved cousin, sister, niece. The skydivers were given a chance at a later time to read or tell their own tributes to Emily.

One of our skydiving colleagues does lighting and sound for professional musicians, and he did an incredible job of setting up a fantastic enormous flat screen and creating rotating pictures of Emily's life. He also compiled and edited a beautiful video tribute to her. Much more happened that I documented on my other blog, but here I want to talk about how the experience impacted me, the whole five days out of my life that felt like being in another world.

So many of my old skydiving friends and students were there, all grown up in the sport, and as we hugged and cried together, I kept hearing how much I have been missed. It was gratifying to hear, but the truth of it is that I have changed: Boulder and that Drop Zone are no longer my home. As wonderful as it was to see everyone again, the circumstances made it almost unendurable. I felt every one of my 68 years. Emily's mother Terry is five years younger than me! I left that part of my life behind when I moved here and I never looked back. Now I am a retired senior who makes a few skydives a year, around 50, instead of 250-400 I made each year for fifteen years. That doesn't mean I don't enjoy it just as much, but I am no longer an instructor and like it that way. Emily many times told me she was going to take my place, take care of young skydivers and especially young women, like I did. She surpassed anything I had accomplished in everything except the length of time she taught.

The day after the memorial, Christmas Eve Day, Sarah drove me to my old boss' home in Boulder, where I stayed with them, Mickey and Karen, and got to see their beautiful grandchildren, Samal and Danesh, who have changed incredibly in the three years since I saw them last. Mica, their mother, married a man from Kazakhstan, Sayat, and the children are two of the smartest, most accomplished six- and four-year-olds on the planet. Really. Walking into their home where I had been many times felt very comfortable, and they went out of their way to accommodate me.

On Christmas Day, Mickey drove me to the airport in Denver and I had an uneventful flight home. Smart Guy was waiting for me when I got off the plane, and he drove me those 100 miles north to our home in Bellingham. I was too tired to do much other than eat dinner, sit in a chair and doze, and went to bed at 7:00pm. I slept like a log for the first time since Emily died.

And now I am home, with a week of traumatic and joyous memories behind me, and I can pick up my own life again and thank God for all my blessings, which are numerous. I had no idea how foreign Boulder would feel to me, after only three years away. I had lived there for almost forty years, after all! The brilliant sunshine was lovely, but I missed my home environment every day. My skin felt shriveled after only five days in the extremely low humidity, and although I loved the sunshine, I found myself moving away from so much direct sunlight. Everyone has their comfort zone, and I understand why it's hard for some people to have all the grey days and rain of this part of Washington, but for me at this time of my life it feels just right.

As we dropped down through the clouds and circled Seattle, I could see the Space Needle and downtown, snow-capped mountains in the distance, and I knew I had come home, to the place where I belong.

Goodbye Emily

2010-12-19T06:40:00.000-08:00

This is not at all what I had in mind to write about today, but yesterday evening I got a call from a friend in Boulder, who wanted me to know that Emily, pictured above with me in 2004 on her graduation jump from student status, was in critical condition. Emily grew up in the years since this was taken, becoming proficient in every single aspect of the sport of skydiving. Thousands of jumps later, an instructor herself, she had far surpassed anything I had accomplished in skydiving.

It was in 2003 when she got a job in the office at Mile Hi Skydiving, a non-jumper herself, and quickly became fascinated with the sport and the people she met. She went through the First Jump Course with several other people and made her first jump with me and another instructor. She was very nervous and readily admitted that she was "high maintenance" and appreciated the extra attention that we gave her. In the plane on that first jump, she balked at climbing into the door, so we sat her down and talked with her as the pilot brought the plane around again. We figured if we gave her another chance and she didn't go, we wouldn't try again. She showed every indication of doing the same thing, but at the very last second, she got into position and we all three floated out the door. I can still see her face in my mind during that skydive.

I went to many parties and gatherings at Emily's home in Denver, which she shared with her husband Lee (a New Zealander usually called Kiwi) and her numerous rescue dogs. Other than the time she spent studying for the bar exam, every moment of every day became devoted to her passion for the sport. She and Kiwi planned and executed a wonderful going-away party for us when we left Colorado.

Emily became a beacon to many timid souls who wanted to skydive but had fears that she easily understood. She told me she wanted to be a caring instructor like me, which flattered me and made me realize how important it is to treat each person with compassion, rather than seeing them simply as generic students. When she received her instructor rating, she called me and cried tears of happiness as she told me of her determination to pass the course.

She already had received a "pro" rating for canopy control and was learning to make more and more aggressive maneuvers under her canopy. I had noticed on her Facebook page that she had traded her docile canopy for a more high-performance one. I learned yesterday that she was making a "swoop" into the landing area when she miscalculated her distance from the ground and hit very very hard. Apparently she had severe head and neck trauma, along with both femurs broken. She was taken to the hospital and flown to a trauma center in Denver.

I read in an email when I woke this morning that her family, Kiwi and her parents, have learned that she is brain dead. They are keeping her body alive until suitable donors for her 38-year-old organs can be found. She is gone and I find myself almost unable to comprehend the loss. She leaves a huge hole that can only be filled by the passage of time.

I snagged this picture of Kiwi and Emily, taken a few days ago at a holiday party, that she had posted along with a hundred others on her Facebook page. I had studied every picture, looking at my old friends and remembering when I was there with them too. This one shows what a beautiful spirit she had. I cannot imagine how Kiwi and her parents are holding up. I know from experience that it's just one breath at a time, one step at a time through the haze of pain and longing.

When I know the details, I will be heading back to Boulder for the first time since I left, to attend the funeral or memorial service or whatever is arranged to honor Emily. It will be bittersweet to be there under such circumstances, but I must go, since she is family in my heart.

The ghosts of Christmas Past

2010-12-18T13:23:00.001-08:00

My first Christmas with Mama and Daddy

This picture was taken in 1943, and it's not really my very first Christmas but the first one where I wasn't just a few weeks old. One thing I love about this picture are my parents in the upper left. Mama is wearing a lacy apron and must be opening something from Daddy, who is leaning forward in anticipation. I sit in the middle of the picture, oblivious to everything but the shiny object in my hands.

I don't know who took the picture, but I suspect it was my aunt or grandmother, since I think we are in their home. It was such a long time ago, but it began my childhood appreciation of Christmastime. And here we are again, as the planet moves around the sun and completes the journey to the winter solstice once more. Four years since I retired and we moved to the Pacific Northwest; how time flies.

Last year at this time I got the news about my dear friend Emily, that she was severely injured from a parachuting accident gone bad. Then I learned that she died. A year ago today I was on the phone getting reservations to fly back to Colorado for the first time since I left. I spent less than a week there and came back home on Christmas Day. It was a terribly hard time, but I saw so many of my friends again and realized with amazement how much I had changed in just a few short years. I had transferred my affections for my previous home town, Boulder, to my new home seamlessly. There is nothing more for me in Colorado, except for the friends of my heart who will always be part of me.

If I were in Texas visiting my siblings and their incredibly huge families, I'd be enveloped in the flurry of visits, parties, Christmas trees, presents, shopping. But since I'm here in Bellingham with my partner who feels as I do, a quiet enjoyment of the season is enough. We don't have to be part of the craziness unless we want to, and we are happy to have a nice Christmas dinner together and buy ourselves anything we might desire. I ordered a new fluffy bathrobe for myself and am wearing it now, my Christmas present to myself. I will give gifts of food to my neighbors, and we have already attended the one party we wouldn't miss. It's enough.

But oh, how I remember the Christmas wishing of my childhood! I would sit and ponder what I wanted to receive from Santa, what desires might be fulfilled. I know I wanted a bride doll one year, and when I would look at her in the window of the store, I was filled with longing. Norma Jean and I actually crept into our parents' closet one year and found our Christmas presents. We stealthily opened them to see what we were getting before wrapping them back up. I think I was the instigator, being the older sister. Since I did that, I well remember the pretty dress I would receive. It's one of the few I recall.

I don't remember at all what I might have bought for other people. When I was young, it was all about the getting, not the giving of Christmas. Now that I am older, that has turned around completely. The enjoyment I receive these days is all from giving things to others, little things that show appreciation and love. Yesterday I finally sent off a pair of my earrings that Norma Jean admired one day on iChat. They just weren't "me" so I was happy to pass them on to her. She loves earrings.

My closet is filled with clothes that I don't wear any more, and I'd like to get those passed along to the right people. I had hoped to do it before Christmas, but it's only a week away now, and I'm not sure I'll get it done before then. I recently gave away some silk scarves I don't wear any more, and that was really fun, making me happy and bringing cheer to other people too.

At the party the other day, one of my friends told me she's got a tree in a pot that she brings in every year to decorate, but a chickadee has built a bird's nest in it that she doesn't want to disturb, so that it can be used again in the springtime. She always has live trees, she told me, because one of the things that bothers her about Christmas is the murder of so many trees. When I was a kid, though, one of my favorite things to do at Christmas time was to lie on my back with my head under the tree, looking up at the sparkling lights, the ornaments glinting, and let the incredible smell of the tree fill me with delight. That smell, along with the smell of gingerbread, takes me back to Christmases past.

Now that I am older, it seems that acquiring things has become more of a burden than a pleasure. Since I don't lack for much, and I seem to have plenty of food and warm clothes to wear, there's not much to wish for any more. My last big purchase was a raincoat that will hopefully keep me dry when hiking in the hills and mountains around town. Next Sunday will be Christmas Day, and until then, I'll reminisce about Christmases gone by while enjoying the present moment.

Destiny

2010-12-12T07:10:00.000-08:00

At this moment, early in the morning before the sun, I am listening to the sound of the rain falling. It's been doing that all night, since we are in the middle of a Pineapple Express. The picture shows what is called an "atmospheric river" bringing warm rain from Hawaii, and as you can see in the picture, it's aimed right for the Pacific Northwest. Yesterday SeaTac had the all-time record rainfall for the date, and they expect the same to happen today. North of Seattle, it's supposed to be wet and warm, but most of the serious flooding problems will be south of us.

This kind of rain hits our part of the world every few years, and it inevitably causes flooding, which I suspect has already started. But that is not what I wanted to post about today.

Yesterday I went by myself to see the movie 127 Hours. If you haven't heard, it's an autobiographical movie about the guy who cut off his own arm after becoming trapped in a Utah desert. For five days. Last night as I began to slip into sleep, I thought about one part of the movie that keeps coming back to me: his hallucinations about the rock that pinned his arm, that the rock and he were intertwined from the beginning of time to meet at that moment.

The concept of destiny intrigues me, as I consider some of the accidents I've had in my life. In 1981 I was bicycling down Boulder Canyon on the first day of summer. It's a 17-mile-long descent and I was really enjoying myself as I sped down the canyon. I was sharing the road with cars, of course, so I moved as far to the right as I could as they made their way around me. Bicycles are common on this road and most of us know how to share.

There is a tunnel through the rock towards the end of the descent, and I would usually ride right through it, but the traffic seemed a little heavy and I worried about not being visible, so I slowed to a stop and waited for a break in the traffic. I got back up onto my bike and started through the tunnel, not moving very fast at the beginning. I was standing on my pedals trying to pick up speed when I was struck from behind by a truck.

Here is a picture of the tunnel. You can see it's not very long, but everything converged just right for me to be invisible to the driver, eyes not adjusted to the dark yet (when my accident happened, there were no lights at the top of the tunnel). I was thrown free of my bike up into the air and landed a few feet away. The driver saw me just before impact but was unable to stop before hitting me. He did, however, stop immediately when he realized what had happened.

I lay there unable to move and knew I was hurt, with no idea how bad it might be. I remember that my first instinct was to wiggle my toes, and I felt them all moving, so I knew that I was not paralyzed. The driver stopped traffic in both directions and somehow (they had cell phones back then, I guess) within fifteen minutes an ambulance arrived. The details are hazy now, but I remember a woman giving me a shot of morphine in the back of my hand, which seemed to calm things down quite a bit. When I was moved to the backboard, even with the shot I was in a lot of pain.

Next thing I knew, I was in a hospital bed, flat on my back, and x-rays showed a fracture of the last thoracic vertebrae. It was amazing to see shards of bone pushed into the tissue. I was very lucky, there was no damage to the spinal column and they left the bone fragments to be absorbed by the body. I remember the incredible pain a few days later when they tried to get me to sit on the side of the bed. I fainted. But they got me fitted for a back brace and within a few weeks I was back at work while wearing the brace. It kept me upright and out of pain; I was only in discomfort when I tried to wean myself away from it.

I had no permanent damage, other than a misshapen vertebrae. That particular place in your back, T-12, is not needed for carrying weight on your back and is not involved in the pelvic region, which would have meant quite a different story for walking. Since there was no permanent injury, I received a small settlement and many visits from the concerned driver of the truck. My bike was pulled completely under the truck and demolished. When I saw it, I was horrified to think how it would have crushed me! I would not be writing this, obviously.

So here I sit, listening still to the rain, and thinking about destiny. I was fortunate, but so many different elements had to align for this accident to happen. And more than that, for it to end up being a positive, rather than a negative, experience. I was able to buy camping equipment and take a six-week-long trip to Peru that fall, hiking in the Andes, having wonderful experiences that I could not have afforded before the accident.

When I was watching the movie yesterday, I remember actually feeling a huge sense of relief when Aron Ralston had finally freed himself from the rock, minus his arm. He wasn't home free yet; he had to rappel down a cliff face to reach possible rescue. With one arm! I was mesmerized by the fortitude of this young man and will head down to the bookstore today to get his book. I'm not quite ready to stop thinking and experiencing what he went through. His destiny changed completely with that experience. Since I was in Boulder when it happened in 2003, I remember well reading stories about him becoming an inspirational speaker and writing a book the next year. He had hallucinations about a son during his experience, or a premonition that he would have one, and this year his son Leo was born. He met his wife two years after the accident.

The convergence of circumstance changes lives every single day. Sometimes it is tragic and horrible, and sometimes it is sublime. And sometimes it's both.

The art of compromise

2010-12-05T06:38:00.000-08:00

Last night I woke to the sound of a car alarm. I peeked at the clock and saw it was after 1:00am and I had been fast asleep. Once whoever's alarm had turned off, I lay awake for awhile, thinking about this post, wondering what to write about. I thought about my dear life partner lying asleep next to me and wondered if he woke from the alarm. No stirring, so I went back to my own thoughts.

We sleep with the bedroom window open a little to allow fresh air to circulate in the bedroom. We always do that, we even did it in Colorado when it was below zero degrees in the winter. The bedroom door is closed so that only one room cools way down. I have a nice down comforter that keeps me warm in all but the most extreme weather, and Smart Guy has his own setup. We sleep in the same bed but with different coverings. It works great for us, and it doesn't keep us from snuggling together if we feel like it. Usually we don't, however. I have never liked to be wrapped together with someone while sleeping; it makes me quite uncomfortable.

When we first got together twenty years ago, we slept in a double bed with covers like everyone else. I'd never experienced another sleeper who tugged as hard on the covers as I did, and one or the other of us was constantly being "outed" to the cold air. We came up with our solution because of the times we spent in a tent together, when we both noticed that we liked having our own sleeping bag because we could be in charge of the covers. It was many years ago that we decided to sleep together in the same bed but with our own coverings. The wonderfulness of having my own comforter that is not going to be disturbed by his nighttime tossing and turning has made our sleeping together a delight, rather than a battle.

When it is very cold, we have another cover that goes over both of our little burrows, but usually it's just two separate sets of coverings next to each other. It looks a little weird to the uninitiated eye, but it's certainly made us both very happy, and now it seems like it's always been that way.

Sometimes I think back to previous bed partners and remember some of the habits that would drive me crazy today. A lover way back in the eighties, Jamie, loved to snuggle, and I would tolerate it until he went to sleep and then creep away so I could also go to sleep. He was a small person and never hogged the covers, but I must say I would wake sometimes in the morning and find that I had taken them all away from him! We never thought of the obvious solution that Smart Guy and I came up with, because we never saw it done before.

Compromise and accommodation are the hallmarks of a good relationship. However, I had to learn to find out what I really wanted before I could compromise, because I thought if I just allowed the other person to have their way, I could live with it. This is a bad idea, because I always harbored thoughts that somehow he should have known something I never shared truthfully! One thing I have learned in this relationship is how powerful it is to talk with and share with another person. I was cursed with the Ozzy and Harriet idea of marriage: the wife is the helpmeet to the important husband and takes care of all his needs without thought of her own. Yeah, right!

Smart Guy wouldn't allow me to get away with it. The early part of our relationship was very stormy because we were so different, and we were both almost fifty with ingrained habits and expectations. But we managed to find common ground through talking, compromise and creative arrangements, with neither of us "giving in" to the other. Sometimes I look at him while he's busy steaming and preparing our vegetables in the kitchen and I'm amazed that we worked it all out. He's the main cook and prepares our food in bursts, rather than daily. The prepared veggies go into the fridge, mine in containers cooked a little more than his, and when it's dinnertime we both prepare ourselves a plate just the way we like it and put it into the microwave. Sometimes when I'm tired from a hike, he will fix a plate for me at my request, and he always makes it much more elegant and lovely than I make for myself. He mixes colors and textures just right.

We do get in the way of each other if we are both in the kitchen, but I'm extremely happy to cede that domain to him, as long as I get fed in the manner to which I've become accustomed. On my other blog I wrote a post showing a picture of my usual dinner. (I called it "Gratitude" for obvious reasons.) I also wrote another post last April showing what the inside of my fridge looks like, in response to another blogger's queries. I named that one "Our Food Choices" and talked a little about how our menu changed when we moved from Colorado to Washington.

The main reason for this post is to remark to myself at how much I've changed in response to my partnership. Neither of us is the same person we were before we met (or, as he said more than once, before we collided). I don't think I could ever have imagined the life we share. If we had done it the way I thought it should be done, we would have separated long ago. But today, I cannot imagine my life without him.

Life stages

2010-11-28T07:15:00.000-08:00

I am always struck when I come over to this blog, preparing to write, when I look at the pictures of me on the banner. Having absolutely no idea what to write about today, but with lots of possibilities stirring around in my head, I stared at those pictures for a long time, thinking. Last night I picked up a journal I wrote in early 1982, wondering who I was then. It's almost embarrassing when I see the naive, sweet person who wrote in there, not the me of today at all. Or is it?

At that time, I had recently experienced a strong religious conversion and was praying and meditating all the time. My wonderful cat Fopaw and I and lived in a basement apartment in Boulder. My half-time job at the National Center for Atmospheric Research was secure. Life was good. That conversion and the years I spent contemplating the possibility of entering a convent, spending Holy Week in prayer and contemplation during those years -- it all seems to have happened to another person. Those years are still inside me, though. Today I don't even attend a church of any kind, and so much has happened to me during those almost-thirty years.

It got me to wondering about the passage of time. Changes come into my life so imperceptibly, to my body, that I don't notice or comment on them, which I guess is natural. The stages of a woman's life are usually thought of as happening in three or four parts. The version I like best is Virgin, Mother, Warrior, Crone. It's empowering to think of those years after motherhood to be in a sense fighting to become an authentic person. The only one of these four that I would change is "Crone," since the sense of that word to me is not just an old woman, but a hag, a disagreeable old crone.

However, in looking up the meaning of the word, I found a reference to a book I read long ago, Joseph Campbell's The Hero With a Thousand Faces. It reminded me that Campbell links the crone to the Fairy Godmother. What a different image comes into my mind with THAT change in wording. The actual meaning of the word is "old woman" and I certainly can identify with that. The young girl who wrote in my journal was in her mid- to late thirties, what I now think of is the prime of life.

Rather than thinking of myself as a different person, though, looking at the handwriting and reading the words I wrote thirty years ago, I see the stepping stone of sincere searching for meaning that I was reaching for in all those religious meditations. It culminates in the person writing here, in this blog, today. This morning, still dark outside and with my partner stirring next to me, I can give thanks for the earlier Me and know that her journey is filled with adventure, discovery, tragedy, and contentment.

This week I will have my 68th birthday. As the oldest sibling in a family of six, we are all still here on the planet, and we are all in relatively good health. My parents had the equivalent of two families: three girls were born within seven years and then they stopped having any children until I was sixteen, when they had three more in quick succession. The last two were born after I had married and left home. My very youngest sister, Fia, just had her 48th birthday and is a grandmother. Being twenty years older than she is, I can wear the mantle of "crone" or "fairy godmother" with pride and look forward to what life experiences still lie ahead.

Although I don't pray or meditate in the same formal sense that I did thirty years ago, the attempt to make contact with God paid off. Today it seems natural to hear the Voice in my heart that assures me the path to wholeness is firmly planted beneath my feet. When I stray off the path, I am very aware of it and quiet contemplation helps me to find my way back.

Cold and snow

2010-11-21T07:20:00.000-08:00

The cold and snow moved in overnight on Friday, canceling my usual Saturday morning walk and making it necessary for me to use my broom like a snow shovel. I broke up the ice in the birdbath and cleared enough of the porch to put some bird seed out for my birdies. Yes, I worried about them all night, thinking of them huddled in some branches trying to keep from being blown away by 45-mph winds and staying warm in below-freezing temperatures.

Sometimes I wonder about the propensity I have to worry about things I can't do anything about. It was a problem last year when I closely followed the web cam of the hatching of an eaglet and watching his parents care for him. I worried when they were gone for too long, hoping nothing had happened to them, and then I was heartbroken when the little eaglet (who was no so little by then) died of pneumonia just before he was ready to fledge the nest. I have been unable to appreciate web cams looking into wild nests since then.

My grandmother was a worrier, and my sister gave me a quote that has served me well: "Worry is a misuse of the imagination." I think of that and then come up with other imaginative ways to worry anyway. The abrupt change in the weather makes me fearful for all the wild creatures in our local woods, but they have been managing quite well without me or my worry since long before humans were even around.

Yesterday, Saturday, I took the bus to town because the roads were frozen and slippery. Since there is no bus service on Sundays any more, I will only venture out on my own two feet today. Our temperatures are not projected to get above freezing, even in the daytime, for the next three days, so the streets and sidewalks will remain treacherous. This part of the country doesn't seem to put much sand on the streets, and walking around town on sidewalks covered with several inches of ice wasn't much fun yesterday.

I remember so well being amused by my grandmother whenever she would come up with things in my life for her to worry about. I remember telling her not to worry, and she would respond, "Well, somebody has to; you don't!" As if there was a need to manufacture scenarios of possible calamity or something dire would occur. And now I have become just like her!

Last night, however, I went to bed feeling satisfied that I had done my part in keeping my birdies safe: they ate more birdseed than ever before in one day; they drank water from the birdbath since all the other water around was frozen solid, and I pictured them in roosting in the trees last night with full bellies, which allowed me to snuggle into my down comforter and sleep quite well, in spite of all the cold and snow.

Our furry friends

2010-11-14T07:29:00.000-08:00

I had a synchronicity of sorts this morning, when I started reading the posts my blogging friends have put on their sites since I last visited. One of the nice things about Google Reader is that I can choose to peruse them quickly or visit the site to leave a comment and see how the post is laid out on the page. My friend Star has a post this morning about a ginger cat of hers, Jasper, who has gone over the Rainbow Bridge. And then the very next post that came up in the Reader was from Judy titled "All Our Pawsome Friends" that informed me about a worldwide moment of silent meditation to remember our furry friends, those here and those who have gone before us. It is scheduled for 3:00pm (Pacific Time) today, and Judy's link gives more information if you want to learn more.

It was my sister and brother-in-law Pete who first introduced me to the concept of the Rainbow Bridge, which is a comforting myth about where our beloved animals go when they die, and how we will all be reunited when we ourselves pass over. Since the Christian Church, especially the Catholic Church, doesn't believe that animals have souls and therefore are gone forever when they die, I think this is a fine remedy to that cruel belief. If love is what life is all about, where is there more perfect love? How can it be gone forever?

Of course we won't ever know the answer to that in this lifetime, but the synchronicity got me to thinking about animals in my life who have been particularly special to me. When I was young, in my early teens, we had a dog I loved immoderately. He was a stray that adopted my parents on a golf course in Puerto Rico. A small terrier mix, we named him Mulligan and he was with our family for many years. One of my favorite memories of my time with him was blackberry picking in Georgia. The woods around our house had lots of wild berries, but also lots of snakes. Mulligan would run ahead looking to scare away any snakes that might threaten me.

He was also one of the smartest dogs I've ever known. Mulligan was as much a family member as any of us, and I can still picture him in my mind. I don't have any pictures of him, but if my sister reads this and sends me one, I'll put it in here. He lived with us in Puerto Rico, California, Texas, and Georgia. His selfless love for each one of us still feels present in my heart. He taught me that you don't have to hold onto grudges or see any family member with anything but love.

Mulligan with my leg on left (thanks, Pete!)

I don't have any pets at this time of my life. When I started skydiving, that passion consumed me completely, and gave me so many options to travel, that it wouldn't have been fair to anyone to have a pet. In my thirties and forties I almost always had a cat, and my dearest one was Fopaw, an all-black cat that was a talker (must have had some Siamese in her). She was long gone by the time I started skydiving. Then I married Smart Guy, who has never lived in a home with a pet, and my job at work changed so that I was traveling a great deal, so I haven't had a cat in twenty years. There is a feral cat who hangs out in our neighborhood here, but I discourage his visits, since I am now feeding the wild birds who come to my porch. It satisfies me a great deal, and we both appreciate watching the bird population who have found us.

Just now, thinking about the birds, I stopped writing while I checked the feeders on the front porch, as the sun is now just beginning to come up. With the time change, the sun arises around 7:15am and sets around 4:30pm, a nine-hour day on its way down to seven hours before we reach the solstice in late December. The birds find a place to roost about a half-hour before the sun goes down and come to breakfast just before sunrise. The juncos are the first to arrive, then the chickadees, sparrows, nuthatches and goldfinch. The woodpeckers and flickers have no schedule I've been able to figure out; they show up to delight me at various times of the day. And our juvenile hawk, who sees my front porch as part of his territory, comes around at least once a day. When he shows up, the porch grows suddenly quiet and empty of other birds. Sometimes he lands on the railing and usually before I can get my camera aimed at him, he's gone. A magnificent bird.

My life has been immensely enriched by all of the furry (and feathered) friends I have known over the years. I think of how many people all over the world who feel the same way, and I give thanks for the opportunity to have known them and to have shared my life with myriad incarnations of love.

Extra hour day

2010-11-07T06:46:00.000-08:00

Today it will seem like I get to have an extra hour, since Daylight Saving Time ended this morning. It's funny how my mind works: there is no difference in the length of the day, but it seems like it. Now in the mornings it will be light out when I walk to the bus, and dark earlier. Here in Bellingham, the sun will set at 4:40pm, and by the end of December it will be dark before 4:00.

I have been asked by many of my friends here if the darkness bothers me. It seems that many people really suffer from the short days, long nights, and often-rainy winter weather. I'm not sure if I will one day feel that pain, but so far, I've enjoyed the warm cozy long evenings and have taken up knitting. Of course, my computer and the feeling of connectivity through my news blogs and the more than sixty-odd blogs I follow from all over the world certainly help. Through the internet, I read about the adventures of my virtual friends, most of whom are older, like me, with the occasional young mother whose children I love to read about and who fill another need. At the coffee shop four days a week, I visit with Leo, who I have watched grow from a baby to a toddler. He comes over to me with his latest book and plops it in my lap. He's beginning to talk now and knows my name. It means so much to me to see his beautiful, bright little face smile at me when he sees me.

The last few days I've woken from sleep with a positive attitude. I don't know what causes it exactly, because sometimes I wake with a pervasive sadness. It helps to remember that whatever feeling I have today is fleeting. It gets better, or it gets worse. I wonder if my age has anything to do with it. When I was a young woman, I couldn't ever feel that my situation would change; it felt permanent. Maybe this is one benefit of getting older: your perspective becomes larger, more expansive, and more forgiving of the human condition. It also becomes more precious, since I know that the length of my life is mostly behind me, and the years ahead are limited. That's okay.

I went to the endodontist this past week to get a root canal, since the crown I got in June has not settled down. My dentist had given me a referral, so I decided to have an expert assess the situation. His prognosis is that, for now, it's not necessary. He told me what to watch for, and said it may not ever stop sending me a twinge of shock now and then when eating or drinking. I also learned that 25-40% of all crowns will eventually need root canals, and as one ages, that percentage continues to increase. Things wear out, and our teeth are not immune. I remember when I was little, almost every person who was my present my age had dentures, and now it's not very common at all.

That reminds me of a woman I met when I was on a trek in the Peruvian Andes. My friend Marla and I were on a week-long trek into the mountains, and we followed a donkey trail to a little village named Colcabamba that our guidebook said was a good place to replenish our supplies. Well, nothing came into that village except by burro, so we were oddities indeed, two women arriving by foot. We were taken in by a wonderful Quechua matriarch, given a place to sleep and food for our journey. The woman and I had some common language: we both spoke some Spanish. I learned that we were the same age, 38. But she looked ancient, and when she smiled, she had only three or four teeth that showed, and all of them were dark and rotten. No endodontists here. No dentists, either. The Quechua chew coca leaves like we use coffee, and they also chew them with lime to release the active ingredients in the leaf. This wreaks havoc on their teeth. So even at a relatively young age, my friend in the Andes was not going to keep her teeth. But I will never forget her. I wonder if she is still alive, thirty years later.

I followed the mid-term elections closely this week, and I was so pleased that Senator Murray here in Washington won re-election. It was touch and go for awhile, and I had braced myself for the worst. Although the Democrats took it on the chin, I did my small part and voted for my local Dems. The health care bill was touted at the main reason we lost the House, but for my part, I am glad they passed it, even with all the political carnage it cost us. We only had a small window of opportunity, and what was passed was so weakened by compromise it hardly resembled the public option I hoped they would pass. But the foot is in the door, and I don't believe it is possible to repeal it. I hope it will be strengthened as the years go by, for the sake of my young friends, like little one-year-old Leo, who deserves to have affordable, accessible health care when he gets sick.

Well, that's the state of my world here on November 7, the day I get an extra hour. What's going on in your little place in the vast Universe?

Day of the Dead

2010-10-31T07:24:00.000-07:00

I saw a couple of women outside the Farmers' Market who had set up this table display for the Day of the Dead, November 1. They looked like mother and daughter to me, and the mother spoke no English and her daughter translated as I asked about the display. They are selling the sugar skulls for $5 each, to be set in your window to remember your loved ones. Mother told me that November 1 is to remember your lost children, and November 2 is to remember your lost adults. They had handouts telling more about the Mexican holiday of Dia de los Muertos.

What I discovered in searching for the origins of the holiday is that in the Catholic Church, November 1 is All Saint's Day, and November 2 is All Soul's Day. Makes sense to me, and Wikipedia tells me the following:

Traditions connected with the holiday include building private altars honoring the deceased using sugar skulls, marigolds, and the favorite foods and beverages of the departed and visiting graves with these as gifts. Due to occurring shortly after Halloween, the Day of the Dead is sometimes thought to be a similar holiday, although the two actually have little in common. The Day of the Dead is a time of celebration, where partying and eating is common.

So here it is Halloween and I'm thinking about my lost children. It's been such a long time ago that Stephen died, back in 1965, and he was only 13 months old. It was a life-changing event, because at the age of 22, I had no idea how to process the loss and became a lost soul myself. Chris was four years old at the time, and he basically lost his mother as well as his brother. It's a time that I rarely look back on. But for the Day of the Dead, I want to remember them. My strongest positive memory of that time is a day when Stephen and I played peekaboo on the bed, with him laughing in that strong baby way, his whole body convulsed with laughter, which of course made me laugh, too. We kept this up for hours, and it remains a strong visual and auditory memory.

I suppose it's normal that with the passage of time your memories begin to fade. I realized when thinking of writing this post that this has already begun to happen with Chris, too. He died in August 2002, now more than eight years ago, and the awful memories of those days of his sudden death have begun to fade, too. I wrote about it here, and I don't want to think of those days right now, but instead the person he was to me.

Chris had a lot of characteristics of his father, whom I had divorced not long after the death of Stephen. Many people know that the death of a child can be a catalyst to force the parents either closer to each other or apart. We didn't have a great marriage, much of which I attribute to our youth and inexperience. I think we would have made it if Stephen hadn't died. Those characteristic mannerisms of his father and ways of looking at the world that Chris displayed are now precious memories. Funny how something that annoyed me has now become something to make me smile with fond recollection.

Chris was really smart. He liked to make up new words that were similar to familiar sounding words and would amaze me with them. I can't today think of any particular ones, but I attribute that to my fading ability to recall them. One day when he was a kid of ten or twelve, I got a call from the school that he had arrived without his shoes. This was in Michigan in February! (After Chris would walk to school, I left for work.) He had ditched his shoes because he read that Indians didn't need them, and he wanted to see what it was like!

He had a great sense of humor, and I can still remember his infectious laugh, which makes me smile just to think of it. He was also a ladies' man, always coming to visit me as an adult with a different woman, and almost all of them had a small child. Chris always adopted these kids in his heart, and I think it was the loss of the relationship with the kids that hurt him the most when they broke up. He never married until he was in the Army, in Germany, and he married a German woman who had a young boy from a previous marriage. They were all very close when he died. Chris never fathered a child himself, and I've always wondered why.

My two sons are still alive in my heart, and Chris comes to visit me frequently in my dreams. I find that being around infants and especially babies around the age that Stephen was when he died fill a need that I still have. I am constantly amazed that the old adage about time healing all wounds is so often shown to me. There is no pain involved in the memories of either of my sons. I am sure that if I allowed myself to grieve for them, it would return, but what's the point? I want to remember them both with the love and devotion they deserve.

So that's what I'll do.

Thinking out loud

2010-10-24T07:24:00.000-07:00

Today I am struggling to write in my usual Sunday morning fashion. Last week I was lamenting my folly about possibly hurting my ears by skydiving with a cold, and this week I have been tossing and turning at night thinking about Medicare and the lack of dental insurance. When I was employed, I had both health and dental coverage, and I never thought much about it. Today it's a whole different story. I waited until I was 65 to retire so that I could be covered by Medicare. And Medicare doesn't care anything about your teeth or your eyes, so you are left to cover that yourself.

If you aren't yet of Medicare age, hopefully by the time you get there the situation will be improved, or at least changed, from what it is today. The confusing number of options and how they affect you is astounding. I don't know how somebody whose mental faculties are diminished can cope. I consider myself smart and with all my faculties, and I am completely flummoxed.

It all started when I received a letter in the mail this week from my primary care doctor that he will no longer accept the Medicare Advantage plan I am currently on. If you only carry straight Medicare, only 80% of your costs are covered, and you have to find a prescription drug plan anyway. The Advantage plans cover both. Medicare has four parts: A covers your hospitalization; B covers medical insurance; C the Advantage plans, and D is drug coverage. Then there are private insurance companies who sell "Medigap" plans that cover the parts of A and B that Medicare doesn't cover. These costs together than be totally crippling. But, as many of us know, illnesses these days can bankrupt you forever, if you end up in a hospital for any length of time.

If you watch any doctor and hospital shows (like House or Grey's Anatomy), they never seem to consider the costs of all the tests and operations they perform at the drop of a hat. That's not the way it works in our country, for sure. You don't opt for expensive treatments, and if you have no insurance at all, you don't even get regular examinations. I cannot believe how much I took for granted in my employment: I was completely covered at no cost to myself in the early 1980s; at a very small cost to me in the late 1980s, but before I retired in 2008, the costs were horrendous. I was paying more than $400 every month out of my paycheck for MY portion of health insurance costs. My employer paid the rest and was busy trying to get everyone to move to something that required you to deposit $5,000 for each person into an account and draw from it.

I didn't worry; I was ready for Medicare, and I thought all my problems would be solved. NOT! At first, in Boulder, I enrolled in a Humana Advantage plan that only cost me $20 a month, and I would pay a co-pay at my doctor's office of $15 for each visit, $30 if I needed to see a specialist. It worked great, but then we moved to Washington state, where the same plan cost five times as much and was not accepted by most doctors around here. Humana is not very popular up here. You can only change your plan once a year, November 15 to December 31, but since I was in my initial enrollment period, I was able to change to something else. I spent countless hours on the phone trying to work all this out, but I finally decided to stay on regular Medicare with a Medigap plan, and a separate prescription drug plan. Even if you don't take any drugs, you are penalized for the rest of your life if you don't sign up right away with Part D.

It worked quite well for that first year, except that I was paying $200 a month (plus the $100 that Medicare deducts from your benefits for Part B), and I never saw the doctor except for a checkup. It seemed to be too much to me, so last year I moved to the Medicare Advantage plan that was accepted by my doctor and covered drugs, too. It worked so well... until now. Being forced to go back into the morass and figure out how to proceed has kept me awake so many nights. And the real problem is that there is nothing for couples, so if you figure that Smart Guy also needs coverage, and we have only our Social Security and annuities, you can see that the costs can spiral out of control very quickly.

Then there's the dentist. After checking into dental insurance, which is ridiculous in both its costs and coverage, I decided to just bite the bullet, pay all the costs myself. Of course not long after finding a new dentist, I needed to have orthodontic surgery and an old crown replaced. We are talking thousands of dollars here. I have also reluctantly concluded that the aforesaid crowned tooth is going to require a root canal, because in four months it still bothers me daily. Another thousand dollars into my mouth. All my savings are dwindling in order to keep myself from going into debt.

Now I know that there are so many people who have absolutely no recourse, no job and no insurance, so I should count my blessings. But the reality is that as I get older, my teeth will continue to cost me more; my health needs cannot be counted on to remain static; and I am approaching my 68th birthday. Not far from there to seventy.

Old age is not for sissies. It not only requires more determination to stay fit, but it also requires assistance from the health community. And the ability and income to access it.

Ruminations

2010-10-17T06:43:00.000-07:00

This Sunday morning I am sitting up in bed (as usual) with my laptop warming my legs as I write, but without Smart Guy in bed next to me. He decided to get up, since my coughing fits kept him from being able to sleep much last night. Same for me.

I noticed a scratchy throat early last week but didn't think much about it, since I figured it was my time to get whatever is going around, and everyone gets a cold now and then. This one started gently and made me think it would gently leave. But no, that's not what has happened. Some sneezing and congestion, but nothing to keep me from my workouts. By the time I got to Thursday, though, night after night with a sore throat, I stayed home from my usual hike with the Seniors. I really wanted to go, but I figured that six hours on a hike with a sick person would not make me especially popular. I stayed home thinking I was being smart and would bounce back quickly, like I always do.

Yesterday, Saturday, I woke feeling well enough to head down to Snohomish and join my favorite people for a couple of skydives in the sunshine. I really thought I was well enough. The first jump went without incident, so I packed up to make another one. This time, however, upon opening the canopy my right ear didn't act right and simply hurt. I guess my sinuses had enough gunk in them to keep my ears from equalizing the pressure. I landed and realized that I shouldn't have been out there jumping anyway, but I did think I was well enough with most of the congestion being in my chest. I made a mistake and this morning the ear is sore and complaining. I don't think I did any permanent damage, though, and I had a good time with my friends. It's amazing how much difficulty I have staying home from skydiving when the weather is fine and my friends might have too much fun without me. I've got more than 4,000 skydives but sometimes I act like a newbie.

Last night I got up in the middle of the night, unable to stop coughing and went to the all-night store for some cough suppressant. Not only was I unable to get much sleep, but Smart Guy, who never complained and offered to go to the store for me, couldn't have slept more than a few hours either. I would have let him go instead of me, had I known what I needed. I was the only person in the store other than the guy at the register. Music blared overhead anyway, I guess it never goes away. After reading the labels carefully, I got what seemed to be the most straightforward option. Went home, swallowed the liquid and went back to bed.

Now I sit here, thinking that this must be the least interesting post I've ever made here. But it's what is on my mind right now: my folly and my illness. It's hard to think of much else when you're not feeling well. If it were not for my ear, the congestion, my croaky voice, the cough -- why, I'd be just fine!

I am not a good patient. Between whining and complaining, I overextend myself because of a belief that I am indestructible, which is not true. There's a whole lot of denial in my mental makeup, but it's usually invisible because I can't see what I don't acknowledge. I remember my paternal grandmother who disowned her daughter. Until the day she died, when asked about her daughter, she would say, "I have no daughter." Even when she was dying and Edith (her daughter) wanted to see her to make amends, she said no, she had no daughter.

I wonder if traits like denial and lack of forgiveness are inherited. I never spent any length of time with my grandmother, but she lives inside me, and I wonder about it. If I told you who I think I am, it would not be accurate, because I don't think any of us can see who we are except through the lens of our family and friends.

Or is that true? Is it worthwhile to look inside for the answers? If so, how does one go about it? That is what this blog is supposed to help me with, but I am flailing here, wanting to discover something about myself that might be unknowable.

I'll feel entirely different when I'm well. So here you are with my October ruminations.

Happy birthday, John

2010-10-10T06:32:00.000-07:00

Yesterday would have been John Lennon's 70th birthday. I saw many references to it, and I find it very interesting that thirty years after he was killed, he is still remembered and even revered by so many. He was the Beatle who meant the most to me, and I followed his career closely. I was among those who were devastated when he was shot and killed.

I found this picture of him on the Internet, and if you enlarge it, you can see it is made of myriad different images of him. I remember when he took several years off to raise his little son and be a stay-at-home dad. Not many men would do that in those days, although today it's much more common. He was such a creative and amazingly talented person, but I am still surprised that he is still in the hearts of so many of us. I still miss him, and I wonder what he would have done with those thirty years that were taken from him.

Today is a special day in other ways, too. It's October 10, 2010, or 10/10/10. Next year we'll have an 11/11/11, and the year after that, 12/12/12 which is supposed to be the End of the World. Or some believe it's 12/21/12, to be exact, right at the Solstice. I spent some time reading about it on Wikipedia and found that the ancient Mayan calendar ends at that time, and several other people and fringe groups project significance on the date. I suppose as we get closer we will have many more apocalyptic warnings. Reminds me of the Y2K hysteria.

Today, however, I can simply admire the symmetry of the alignment of all those tens lined up in a row. Exactly the same number of years that John had stolen from him by a madman's gun. I can still wonder what he might have accomplished in those years. When I look at Sir Paul McCartney's thirty-year journey, and compare what I think John would have accomplished, I speculate about where John's brilliant and unique mind would have traveled.

We were of a similar age. He was born in 1940, and I was born in 1942. I will be seventy in two years, and it's been an amazing thirty years, when I think back to the person I was in 1980 and travel backwards in time through my memories. One event stands out: a few days after John was killed, there was a worldwide solemn moment of silence planned at noon, I believe. I know it was in the middle of the day, and I was in sunny Boulder just leaving one of my favorite restaurants. Suddenly it grew quiet all around me, and I remembered the planned moment of silence and stopped where I was and allowed myself to feel the heaviness in my heart.

It grew very quiet, no cars whizzing by. The only sound at that moment was from a young man riding by on a motorcycle with a boom box on it, playing "Strawberry Fields Forever" at full volume. Everywhere around me I saw tears glinting on faces, loss and grief fresh for a man we only knew through his music. But what music it was.

Happy birthday, John. I still hear your music wafting through the airwaves, almost every day, thirty years later. Your songs have never lost their magic. I guess they never will.

Cyberbullies

2010-10-03T06:41:00.000-07:00

I've been sickened by the story of Tyler Clementi, the young Rutgers University student who jumped off the George Washington Bridge last week. He did it because the other two young people in this picture spied on him through a web cam in the privacy of his room and watched him having sex with another male student. Then Ravi streamed the video to his 150 Twitter followers. It's all over the news, and I can't help but think about Tyler's death and the shattered lives of Ravi and Wei, who were arrested and then released.

Tyler was a gifted musician who didn't know he was being watched during those moments of intimacy. I've wondered how I would feel if I found out that I had been spied on while having sex and decided that the sense of betrayal and invasion would be huge. All three of them were Rutgers freshmen and only 18 years old. You don't learn much about the rules of college in three weeks, that's all the longer they had been away from home and away at school. But I think Ravi didn't realize how awful a crime he was committing by spying on his roommate. If he had thought about how he would feel if the tables were turned, maybe he wouldn't have done it. But when you're 18, you don't think about consequences the way you do when you're an adult.

Tyler was a sweet, shy, gifted musician who had asked his roommate for the dorm room for a few hours. He didn't know what had happened until rumors started to spread about what Ravi had done and who watched him having sex. The last thing he did before heading to the bridge was to practice with another musician (who said he didn't know anything was wrong) and then take his wallet and cellphone out of his pocket before jumping off the bridge. I can only imagine the turmoil going on in his head.

An article published today on NJ.com has shown that this suicide and the act itself, all happening during the run-up to National Coming Out Week, is causing ripples throughout the world. Already action has been introduced in the New Jersey legislature to stiffen the criminal penalties for cyber-harrassment. Ellen DeGeneres put a plea on her program to ask people to be kind to each other and help to keep something like this happening again. And this tragedy is only one of four similar suicides at schools around the country since school began, all because of young kids being unable to handle the cruelty that others showed toward them because of being gay.

I keep waking up at night thinking about things, and this suicide keeps coming into my thoughts. It's because the world of instant media and streaming videos has become so easy to access, and young people don't seem to know how to handle it. From that article:

"Intolerance is growing at the same time cyberspace has given every one of us an almost magical ability to invade other people’s lives," said Robert O’Brien, a Rutgers instructor who says he has, by default, become a spokesman for "overwhelmed" lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender students on campus.

The juxtaposition of, as he says, an almost magical ability to invade other people's lives with thoughtless intolerance has caused this outcry. It's a sign of our times, and when you think of Facebook, Twitter, and web cams on every little device in our pockets, I guess this collision of values was inevitable. But I would have thought that this kind of invasion of privacy would only appeal to sick voyeurs.

Those two young voyeurs are probably very sorry about what they did, but it's too late for them, too. Their lives are irreparably changed because of this act, whether it was unthinking or premeditated. It doesn't matter: I'm sure they are in hiding somewhere, not going about their business at school as if nothing ever happened.

Our world is changing so fast, and technology is not only our friend (making it possible for me to write this and state my opinion) but also very much like a loaded gun in the hands of children.

Mickey and Karen

2010-09-26T06:51:00.000-07:00

Smart Guy, Mickey, Karen (click to enlarge)

Yesterday my ex-boss Mickey and his wife Karen came to Bellingham for a vacation and to visit us. That's our front porch where we had a little repast before taking them to their hotel (we don't have much room for guests to stay). As you can see, it was a sunny day, with a strong breeze blowing from the south. We were only one degree shy of the record temperature for the date.

I worked with Mickey for thirty years. Karen was a secretary in our department way back in the late seventies and early eighties at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. When they began to date, she transferred out of the department, and I attended their wedding 29 years ago. Karen went back to school and got a degree in social work, which she will be retiring from this December. Mickey, although he is going on 71, is still not slowing down. I think Karen wanted him to see how happy some people can be in retirement, but he's not having any of it. He's just not ready.

Mickey is a true "citizen of the world," comfortable in every corner of the most remote areas, or in the middle of a big city. He's curious about everything and absolutely loves used bookstores. I can remember many times I followed him, waiting in some foreign land while he perused books in the local language. Yesterday we walked around in the sunshine, and I showed him a couple of used bookstores that he will go back and delve into more deeply. They will be here all day and leave in mid-morning tomorrow (Monday). I hope to take Karen to join me in my favorite exercise class before they head out of town, back to Seattle to fly home to Boulder.

Because of Mickey, I have been to many parts of the world. I've been his assistant at meetings in Paris, Moscow, Hanoi, Saigon, Havana, Geneva, Bangkok, Urumqi (western China), Beijing, Shanghai, Macao, and Budapest. I'm sure I've missed a few, but you get the idea. He still travels all over the world to climate meetings but no longer arranges conferences like we did for so long.

We sat at the restaurant in their upscale hotel yesterday, reminiscing about many of those trips, since Karen was along on many of them, as was Smart Guy. The four of us went together on a side trip while in China to Xian to see the terracotta soldiers. We all agreed that it was one of the most amazing things we have ever seen. If you know little or nothing about the Terracotta Army, that link will take you to the Wikipedia page, but here's a little of what I know.

In 1974, some local farmers near Xian were drilling a well for water when they discovered some of the terracotta figures in a pit. Dating from 210 BC, these figurines are all different from each other and some historians think they are modeled after actual soldiers. From the Wikipedia link:

The figures include warriors, chariots, horses, officials, acrobats, strongmen, and musicians. Current estimates are that in the three pits containing the Terracotta Army there were over 8,000 soldiers, 130 chariots with 520 horses and 150 cavalry horses, the majority of which are still buried in the pits.

After we had gone into the large area where the majority of the unearthed soldiers are housed, we were able to buy a book telling what is known about them and giving us pictures of them all. We were able to get the farmer who found them to sign our books. I guess he's there most days and is paid by the Chinese government. I was not able to take a picture of him as it was forbidden. If you ever get a chance to see these soldiers, it is an experience not to be missed. What is known about their origin is that the ancient Chinese Emperor who founded the Qin Dynasty commissioned the Army to help rule another empire in the afterlife.

My memories of the years I worked with Mickey are filled with such amazing events. You would think that we might have stayed in fancy American-type hotels, but another thing Mickey insisted upon is that we accommodate our visitors and ourselves in local hotels. This was mostly a good thing, but I do remember in Moscow we stayed at a hotel that I could only describe as primitive. The room was only about 10-12 feet wide with a narrow wooden bed with a futon on top. The 14th-floor window opened, but there was no air conditioning (it was very hot) and no screens. I could have fallen out if I wasn't careful. The bathroom had no hot water and only one spigot that swiveled from the sink to the claw-footed tub. I just held the hose and wet myself down while standing in the tub, then dried with a towel about the size of a dishtowel. The hard brown soap didn't even make a lather. Since I was there for six nights, I did get a reasonable towel and soap for subsequent "baths."

Even though it sounds rough, Mickey was right: I didn't forget that trip, and there is no way it could fade into the mists of time. I can still remember those baths. Incredibly, I slept very well on the hard futon. That is just one of the amazing experiences I had while working for Mickey. We did a lot of good things during those years.

Seeing the two of them again has brought up many memories that I cherish. Today, hopefully, we will make more memories and have some new adventures together. They might not carry the same weight as those heady days of international travel, but we are all older now, more sedate, and happy with smaller pleasures. Except for Mickey, who is still going, and going, just like the Energizer Bunny.