My mother's parents

My grandparents on my mother's side were very interesting people. I figure now that I've gotten to the present day, I can now write about anything I want, so I'll write about my ancestry. I'm interested in how much of their traits continue on in me. This unlikely pairing of Ernestina Chacon, well-connected Spanish beauty, and Leo Rice, Welsh businessman, is a story that was repeated endlessly in the lives of many during the early twentieth century.

I spent a good bit of the day yesterday on the phone talking to my aunt, my mother's older sister who is almost 88 years old and gave me a lot of information about her parents. When Aunt Quetita laughs, she sounds like a girl. She is sharp as a tack, too. This is about her parents, my grandparents on my mother's side.

They met in a railroad station in Trinidad, Colorado. Ernestina's parents were part of the establishment in that town, and she was a good Catholic girl who had fallen in love with a soldier who was not Catholic. Over the period of two years, they met each other only three times before they were married. Since he was not Catholic, it was a bit of a scandal and the long-time priest at the church would not marry them. However, the parents were able to find another Catholic priest to bless the union, and the marriage of Mr. and Mrs. Leo Rice was launched.

Ernestina bore six children to Leo, starting with my uncle Anthony and then Quetita. Leo became a hotel manager and moved from place to place, trying to find a climate that would be healthy for his fragile firstborn son. My mother, Rita, the third child, was born in Springfield, Illinois. Eventually they moved to Southern California, where Ernestina had three more children: Edmund, Joseph, and finally Ernest. Six children in all, before Ernestina spoke with a doctor who told her how she could avoid having any more children. (She didn't know how come she kept getting pregnant, Quetita says.)

By this time, they had settled in Bakersfield, California. Leo was the manager of the Bakersfield Inn and eventually rented the attached drive-in restaurant. He managed the hotel and the very successful "Leo's Drive-In." It didn't hurt his profits that his wife was the cook for the entire restaurant, his two lovely (and buxom) daughters the carhops, and his sons all worked for next to nothing. Before long, they had moved to a large, two-story home.

My childhood memories of their beautiful house on V Street in Bakersfield (where we spent long periods when Daddy was gone TDY, temporary duty) included the most amazing grape arbor over the carport, which seemed to be always laden down with huge bunches of green seedless grapes. I would eat them until I was sick. The back yard continued a long way back, the first part a yard with fruit trees, Felix the duck who swam around in a large metal tub, and beyond that an overgrown rose garden, with fragrant roses assaulting my young nose. Funny how often smells bring back memories. I remember one time when I was actually living there long enough to attend school in Bakersfield.

As a child you live in your own world and don't really think about the adult world, or at least I didn't. I know that when my father was stationed outside of Fairfield, California, we spent a great deal of time in Bakersfield as well. That house is filled in my memories with many good times.

Leo developed diabetes and was very ill for many of the last years of his life, and he only lived to be 62. In my mind, though, he was extremely frail and old. My mother was very close to her father and suffered terribly when he died. I remember that she even had to go away for awhile, and as an adult I learned that she suffered a nervous breakdown during that time. There were three of us by then: me, my sister Norma Jean and little P.J. (Patricia June was always known by her initials as a baby.)

When Leo died, his wife of all those years learned that he was a gambler and had mortgaged that beautiful house to the hilt, without her knowledge. She was turned out of her home, and Grandma (I only called her that) never forgave Leo for what he had done. Years later when I was taking care of her in Santa Monica, after my bicycle trip across the country, I remember taking her to the cemetery where her son Joseph was buried. Leo was also buried there, and I asked her if she wanted to visit his grave too.

She stood beside me rapping the ground with her cane, looking straight ahead, before she answered me with an emphatic "No!" Even though it had been decades, she still would not forgive him. Grandma lived on for several more years, but she finally died at the age of 79, living many years longer than the doctors believed she would.

I learned from my grandmother that carrying grudges around can be very debilitating and harmful to the one carrying them. She had her children's and her grandchildren's lives to live, but I don't think she ever developed one for herself. It was very hard for me to leave Grandma after five months of caring for her, but I did, because I saw I would be swallowed up into her life and she would try to live hers through me.

This is the way it used to be for women, and I am also struck again by how much has changed in our culture during the past century. Ernestina was Mrs. Leo Rice, mother of six. I wonder who she would have been if the seed of her life had fallen into more fertile ground?

Choosing a new home

Last night I had a dream about my son Chris. Since it's been a while since I woke, I don't remember the particulars, but I know he was a teenager in my dream, and he was happy. Having spent so many years as a mom, I still feel like one. You can't stop being a parent just because your children have died before you.

In 2006, I had been working for almost three decades at NCAR, the National Center for Atmospheric Research, and my duties for the past decade had taken me all over the world to arrange conferences and write reports after I returned to Boulder. This, plus my weekend activities at the Drop Zone, gave me a very full life. In fact, too full. I was getting tired as I approached my 64th birthday. Because I needed to reach Medicare age before I could retire, I was looking forward to turning 65.

Smart Guy and I began to think about our options. What did we want to do with our retirement years? He was already out of the work force and on Social Security, and I would be able to convert my TIAA/CREF annuities that I had been contributing to during my time at NCAR into a small monthly income. That, plus our two Social Security checks, would be what we would use to live on for the rest of our lives. That amount looked to be sufficient if we didn't have any huge expenses. It would not be enough to go on cruises and live extravagantly, but that isn't what we were looking for anyway.

In the summer of 2006, after having decided we wanted to live somewhere on the West Coast, we took a month-long car trip to Washington state. We looked at communities up and down the coast, and even gave a little thought to living across the border in Canada, but we found a small town situated 20 miles south of the Canadian border and 85 miles north of Seattle: Bellingham. The proximity to Vancouver and Seattle is important, but we didn't want to live in a big city. This town seemed to be the right size, a good jumping-off place.

The only real problem with the town, to me, is a major freeway passing north and south through the middle of town, I-5, which stretches from the Canadian border all the way to southern California. It gets a lot of traffic, and finding a place away from the white noise of traffic has been difficult. That aside, it has a great bus system, which is incredibly inexpensive for seniors ($35 for a three-month pass giving you unlimited rides throughout the entire county).

When we got back from our trip, I gave my boss a year's notice, telling him that I would be leaving at the end of March 2008. Hopefully I would be able to hire my replacement during that period. This also gave us enough time to figure out what we wanted to take and what to leave behind. Two paid-for Hondas would go with us, a little furniture, not much, and that was it.

In February 2008, Smart Guy set out with a few things packed into his Honda and drove to Bellingham. We talked on the phone daily, and we used our iChat feature on our laptops to video conference with each other, and he found a nice apartment within our price range and moved in on March 1, 2008. He lived there alone for a month while I finished up at NCAR, with a nice retirement party, and my boss Mickey gave me one at his house, where my women's group and private friends gathered to say goodbye to me. I did think I would return one day, but as of today I still haven't.

Smart Guy flew back to Boulder, we packed up my car and a medium-sized U-Haul truck, and I said goodbye to my chosen home of more than three decades, to find a new life in retirement. We had our cellphones, which worked well to talk to each other on the road and coordinate pit stops. On April 17, 2008, we drove up to our new place here in Bellingham, moved in our furniture, and started a new life.

What to do with myself? No job, no responsibilities, and no friends or family nearby. My own siblings all live in different places, but the majority of them live in Texas, which was never a place I wanted to retire in: too hot, too flat, and too conservative for this old hippie.

The first thing I did was join the YMCA. Bellingham has a great one, with exercise classes of all kinds every day, a sauna and steam bath for after the workout. I got a locker and moved in my exercise stuff, and started taking the bus to town each morning to attend a 9:00am class. Since the bus schedule brought me to town a little after 8:00am, I began hanging out at a local coffee shop for my morning latte. This is where the core of my new friends are: people who ride the bus with me every day, regulars at the gym, and regulars at the coffee shop. I also joined the Senior Center and began Thursday hikes with the Senior Trailblazers. I've been learning about the area through these hikes, and I've also made some great friends. In the summer we head to the high country, and in the winter we stay close to town. We head out, rain or shine.

And almost exactly a year ago now, I started a blog. This activity has filled a great void in my life for creative writing. A few months ago I began this second blog, which I think of as the Eye blog (or in Mac speak, iBlog), giving me a place to write down and ruminate about how I got here, and where I want to go. I've written 15 posts to get to the present time, writing down the most difficult and wrenching events that have made me who I am today.

From here, I'm not sure where to go with this blog, but I suspect it will come to me before next Sunday. Writing in here in the early morning hours before I get out of bed has become a satisfying ritual. Once I've banged out the first draft, I re-read and edit it until I'm happy with it.

Then I hit "publish" and ponder what my life is all about.

Till we meet again

Yes, this post is hard to write, but not as bad as if it were still September 2002. That's when I wrote a remembrance to my son Chris at work. He died of what is called "sudden cardiac death" while jogging. Since this happened, I have seen several young people, usually men, written up on the obituary page as having died of the same thing. Part of the difficulty of it is that there is no warning, either for them, or for their loved ones.

I had just returned from Quincy where I had a two-week vacation, if you can call it that, jumping out of airplanes at the World Freefall Convention, tanned and happy to be back at work. I remember the phone ringing at 9:00am in the office and hearing the clicks and pops of a long-distance connection, and then a hysterical woman on the other end, saying things I could not understand. (Chris' wife Silvia was German and didn't speak great English at the best of times.) When I finally put together who she was, I felt a sick feeling and asked her what was wrong. She babbled something about Chris and finally said, "he's dead!" It was like being kicked in the stomach.

Finally Chris' Commanding Officer came on the phone and told me that Chris had died while he was on a three-month tour of duty in Macedonia. He told me in the gentlest way that I was to go home and wait for the soldiers to come to my house and inform me. I have a memory of one of my co-workers driving me home, but I was in shock. Once I got home, three young uniformed soldiers knocked on my door, one of them a young woman holding flowers in her hands and looking scared. They answered my questions, and told me that Chris' wife had asked for him to be buried in Germany, and as the next of kin, she could make that decision.

Then I found that there was no provision from the Army for me to get to Germany to see my son one more time. You see, I was no longer considered the next of kin, Silvia was. But when my boss Mickey heard about this, he presented me with a round-trip ticket to Frankfurt and $500 and told me to just go. I went to Germany. The link above will tell you about my time there. I learned that Chris had been happy and very well liked, and I spoke to his unit one morning about how glad I was that he had found his place in life.

The funeral was very tough. Nobody had told me about the Army's calling his name three times as if he were to answer, and when he didn't, they played "taps" to honor the fallen soldier. It was truly hard to bear. Some very thoughtful person had recorded it and gave me a copy of the Memorial Service. I have never watched it, but it holds a very special place on my keepsake shelf, along with the triangular box that holds the flag with three spent shells inside.

I was 59 years old when Chris died on August 15, 2002, on the anniversary of the day that his brother Stephen had been born 36 years earlier. The difference between me, the 59-year-old, and that young 22-year-old who lost her child was like night and day. If anyone were to ask me which one was harder to bear, there is no question: the poor young woman who lost her son who never had a chance to live, or the older woman who lost her other son after he had found himself, a career and a wife -- I don't have to tell you, you already know.

I also wrote another post about my two lost sons on my other blog, which I called "Amethyst Remembrance" after a favorite Emily Dickinson poem. It gives more detail, but here I want to talk about who I am today, and how the loss of my children has helped to make me who I am. When Stephen died, I could not bear to be in the same room with a small baby, whose beautiful chubby cheeks or fat arms tore at my heart and made me so aware of my loss. I turned away and avoided touching that place inside that felt like it would never be healed. Chris suffered too, because he reminded me of his brother, and I wouldn't let myself love him unconditionally. I hardened myself in ways I didn't even realize. I think this is one reason why I went from one husband to another: it was impossible for me to reach down inside and be truly authentic with anybody.

But when Chris died, I had found a job, a life I loved, and a man who supported me emotionally. He had helped me work through some of the buried grief and I learned that I was not going to find myself through another person, but through examining my own motives and desires. This is much easier to do when you have a partner who knows how to facilitate this, and I have been very fortunate to have Smart Guy, who always asked the right questions.

Because I had healed from my earlier wounds, I was able to grieve properly for Chris. I didn't look away when I went to Germany and met his fellow soldiers, when I went to the PT field and did pushups and jumping jacks in his place. I let it in. And although I miss calling him and hearing from him on Mother's Day and his birthday (he called me then, not on mine), I know that he had found himself before he died. It's all any mother can ask for.

Chris died just before the war in Iraq started. Every one of those young men I met in Germany was deployed to Iraq, and Chris would certainly have gone there too, and would probably have died there instead of in Macedonia. He never had to go to war, and for that I am grateful. His roommate in Macedonia told me how Chris would come back to their room after having been in the heat of the day, guarding the border: he would strip down to his shorts, turn the air conditioning to high, grab a beer out of the fridge, and plop down with a satisfying "ahhhhh!" That's the way I like to think of him, with a hedonistic grin and pleased with a job well done.

When you don't have grandchildren, and both of your offspring are gone from the world, your life doesn't necessarily include small children any more. But I find myself enjoying them so very much. There is a young boy, 13 months old, whose dad brings him every morning to the coffee shop where I have my latte. I've watched him over the past few months learn to walk, first by holding onto tables, then those first tentative steps like a drunken sailor, and now the confidence that he doesn't have to hold onto anything. It gives me such pleasure to watch, knowing that this beautiful child doesn't have to be my kin for me to love him.

Next Sunday I'll talk about these last few years that took me away from a job I had for almost three decades, and how I moved from a full-time job into retirement.

Intensity on many levels

Sunday morning again. I just finished re-reading last week's post to make sure I don't miss anything. When we got married in freefall, I was 51 years old and a veteran of three previous marriages that didn't work out. For two decades, I was sure that I would never marry again, but when we did, finding our way forward centered on our shared love of skydiving. He started skydiving in 1962 and was well known in the small skydiving world of the 1960s and 1970s, and I made my first jump in 1990, so we were at opposite ends of learning about skydiving.

To someone who doesn't skydive, it might seem a little odd to say that it is a learning experience that continues as long as you are jumping. And I didn't know what I wanted to do with my jumping life. You see, there are different disciplines in skydiving: relative work (RW), freestyle (back then anyway), canopy formations (made after you open your parachute), videography, and a few others. I decided I wanted to become an instructor, which is probably the hardest and most difficult experience I've ever had. Smart Guy would pretend to be a student for me, and I would try to give him signals in freefall and control his antics as if he were a student.

After I had almost 1,000 jumps, I thought I was ready to attend a course. These courses are held at various places around the country several times a year. We went to Davis, California, and I entered the stress of two days of classroom, then a week of being tested in the air by having an evaluator pretending to be a student, with video (taken by a third person). You paid lots of money for this privilege, plus the slots on the plane for three people.

I failed miserably. I did not even get close to passing the course my first time through. After going home and spending every waking moment talking with Smart Guy about what I needed to learn and practicing every weekend, I went off to Texas in 1994 to try again. It was just a month after we got married that I went there. And I passed! On June 18, 1994, I became an AFF (Accelerated Freefall) skydiving instructor! And the learning went on and on, with me loving it and learning how to help others to become a skydiver.

Every August, we went off to the World Freefall Convention in Quincy, Illinois, and we had been given a big area to set up for young (meaning not many jumps) skydivers to hang out in. This would keep them safer and still learning instead of getting in over their heads. I didn't particularly want to perform complicated skydives with people, and I was so very happy to make up simple jumps and had as many as a dozen other skydivers working for me, doing the same thing. Smart Guy and I ran this tent for inexperienced jumpers for many years. By the year 2000, I had accumulated over 2,000 skydives.

By this time, every weekend I was instructing, and my job became more intense. I was promoted to a salaried position in 1999, and I began to travel with my boss all over the world. My first trip was to Geneva, then Macao in 2000, and I ended up making many international trips to interesting places. I organized several dozen international scientific meetings and helped to write the report that followed.

As you can imagine, my life was very full. I never spent a day doing anything but going either to work, international travel,  teaching skydiving on the weekends, or going off to skydiving events. And then, a mistake under canopy. A bad one.

On June 18, 2000, I was trying to land my parachute in high winds and made a turn close to the ground, which ended up with me fracturing my pelvis in six places, shattering the sacrum on the right side. I wrote about the experience on my other blog here. All the gory details are on that other post, but here I want to talk about what the accident did to our relationship. It only deepened our commitment to one another. I was completely and utterly dependent on Smart Guy for everything, from cooking for me, emptying the commode, helping me get around. It was hard on him, I know, but he never complained and kept his usual humor.

When I was finally able to get around by myself again and the external fixator had been removed from my pelvis, I returned to work after missing a couple of months. My job was waiting for me, and I was able to return to the skydiving world over Christmas vacation in 2000, at Eloy, Arizona, while attending Skydive Arizona's annual Christmas event. Six months later, I was back in the air!

Before too many months, I was back teaching students again, and I also spent many a Saturday teaching the First Jump Course, teaching as many as a dozen students to make their first jump safely. I got so involved in all this that I decided to run for Regional Director for the United States Parachute Association, so that I could be involved in helping with skydiving safety and training issues. I was on the Board for four years, and I finally learned that I am not a political person. And that is what it was: you had to learn how to get the votes on the Board in order to get anything passed. I made a lot of friends in the national skydiving arena, but I was not cut out to be a Board member.

So, as you can see, skydiving and my job were very intense, and our relationship shined right through all this. But I began to change. As Smart Guy once said to me, you can't have a hundred jumps forever; the experience of skydiving changes as you move through it, and after a while I no longer felt it was necessary for me to be at the Drop Zone EVERY weekend, or pushing myself to the limit every moment of every day.

In August 2002, another part of my life changed when my son Chris died suddenly. His wife called me from Germany and I learned that he was gone. I'll tell you about that tragic time in my life next week.

Major struggle, major accomplishments

It's Sunday morning again, and I'm sitting in my bed with Smart Guy beginning to stir as it's a little later than usual when I start this post. I read all my blogs and even received a wonderful award from TechnoBabe for this blog. I'm hoping she will be okay with me linking it to my other blog, since this one is reserved (in my mind) for more weighty subjects.

When we left last week, I had described my experience of beginning to skydive, and having met Smart Guy through the internet. Several people commented that they were looking forward to reading about the romance that came from that. I'll use the description Smart Guy used: when we began to meet in person, it was not so much an encounter as a collision. It is no exaggeration to say that if we had met in the usual way, at a party, or even at the Drop Zone, we would never have gotten together. It's because, even though we loved each other's minds, our bodies were really a problem: I reminded him of his mother, who he didn't have fond memories of, and I was dismayed by the, well, old-man vibes he gave off.

You see, he had stopped skydiving on a regular basis several years before (unbeknownst to me on the internet) and had let himself get out of shape while working in a job he hated. When the love of my life stepped off the plane, with my heart pounding as we would meet for the first time, he walked right by me and I tried to look around him to see someone who didn't exist. When we finally looked into each other's eyes, we had to look twice or three times to recognize the person we were wanting to see.

And then I made the mistake of trying to attack this gentle soul in the car, thinking that with a little push (maybe a big push), he would be just like any other man and would want to get hot and heavy right away. This was exactly the WRONG approach to Smart Guy. He is private and intellectual and did not appreciate being overpowered. By the time he left a few days later, we had made some tentative steps toward liking each other, but I was not able to reconcile our intense desire to know each other with the slow progress (to me at least) that we had made in two days.

Obviously, this was the beginning of a tough patch in our relationship. The next weekend I flew to San Francisco and onto his turf. I remember he met me at the airplane with a bouquet of flowers and I was deeply touched. I knew him much better after that weekend encounter, because I could see who he was so much better by seeing how he lived. When I opened the cupboard in his kitchen, a single plate and glass were all that were in that pristine (and very clean) area, while in MY overpacked cupboard, I knew he must have been appalled at the disorder that spilled out of it.

Even with that inauspicious beginning, we decided after a few more trips back and forth that someone would need to move. Since he hated his job and I loved mine, he would move to Boulder. He considers our marriage beginning on the day he walked into his boss's office and gave notice, and when I would take him onto my insurance coverage: January 27, 1993.

Our first months together were both tough and hopeful. He found a place to live and we began to see a counselor, who helped us through a period of difficult misunderstandings. I think the biggest and most important thing is we talked and talked, and little by little we saw in the other person the potential life mate we originally thought we had met through our words. It was because I could not imagine my life without him that he and I eventually did get married (to me at least, marriage certificate, and all that) on May 5, 1994.

Because I was an active skydiver and we talked endlessly about it, eventually Smart Guy began to skydive again, and he had gotten his own gear by the time we got married, because it was in freefall. Here's a picture of our wedding portrait, which was taken by our best man. Smart Guy already had made thousands of skydives, many of them with his first wife, Clarice, and I had been jealous of her until we were able to have our own memories of freefall together. This one is very special: we passed the "baton of commitment" between us, and he is holding it in his left hand. That's Loveland, Colorado, and I-25 below us (click to enlarge).

This post is getting very long, and I haven't yet talked about how Smart Guy became my teacher in order for me to gain the skills necessary to become an instructor. I think I'll have to make that my goal for next time. Thanks for joining me on this journey.

How I became a skydiver

Cut to June 1990. I'm now working full time at NCAR and I even have a car again. I'm living in a small basement apartment and have a very full life. I'm 47 and in good health; Chris lives nearby and visits me often. I have been a volunteer with the Forest Service for years now.

This is the setting for the next part of my life. I went to an air show with some friends and saw some skydivers landing on the grass in front of me. It was so exciting to see, and one of them, a guy named Mike, walked right by me and I saw he was barefoot! I asked him if it didn't hurt to land without shoes, and he handed me a discount coupon to try a skydive and pointed to the office. I went there and watched a couple of videos and my friend and I decided to use our coupons to make a tandem jump. We reserved spots for three months later, in September. Secretly I was glad the date was so far in the future, because I could find lots of reasons to back out.

But September came anyway, and I was confronted by my fear. I had a nightmare that I was staring into a huge dark hole and forced to jump into the void. The day dawned clear and calm, without a cloud in the sky. Weather was not going to cooperate. I met my tandem instructor. He showed me a video and told me that I would be strapped to his front side, and that I would have a chance to pull the ripcord if I wanted, but if I didn't pull it, he would. To this day I can remember the dread I felt as we walked to the small Cessna. There were five skydivers in the plane: two tandem instructors, me and the other passenger, and Mike, the guy who had given me the coupon. He would be getting out at a lower altitude, and we would be going to "the top" or two miles above the ground (12,000 feet, to be exact). The plane took off.

After a few minutes, Mike rolled up the canvas door and exposed the whole side of the plane open to the wind. I shrank back, even though I was sitting between my instructor's legs. Mike put his legs outside, looked back at me with that big smile, and fell out, smiling up at me the whole time. I watched his parachute open and I was aghast at what I was getting ready to do! The instructor rolled the door back down and we went up, up, higher and higher.

Now it was time. The door was opened again, and this time I put my legs out, crossed my arms in front of me, and suddenly we were in freefall. Freefall is like nothing you have ever experienced in your life. Your body thinks it's going to die, but you don't. You're in another world. It doesn't feel like you are falling. The wind is strong, and I forgot about everything, I didn't even realize that the tandem instructor was there with me. I saw a hand in front of my face, pointing at the ripcord and I remembered I was supposed to pull it. I did. And whump! We were suddenly no longer in freefall but under a huge rectangular rainbow of color.

My instructor asked me to help him steer the parachute, which I did, and I looked at the mountains, the sky, the ground. It was beautiful, so beautiful, as we headed back down to the landing area where I had originally seen Mike land barefoot. We landed softly and the instructor unhooked me from him. The experience still lives in my memory so clearly.

As I headed back home from the Drop Zone, I could not stop thinking about the freefall. It was like being on another planet, in another universe, and I wanted to feel that again. Three weeks later I made two more tandem jumps, and then I faced my dilemma: I wanted to learn to jump by myself, but I was already much older than most skydivers, and I was unable to decide whether or not I could work through my fear.

Because make no mistake: although I was thrilled to experience that freefall, I was also terrified. I knew that if I didn't go ahead and try, it would be the fear that kept me back, not expense, not lack of ability, just fear. I decided to take it one step at a time. I went through the basic course, a day-long lesson of learning how to deal with any emergency that might happen, because I would no longer be strapped to anybody, but under my own parachute.

I went through what is called AFF (Accelerated Freefall) training, where I was accompanied by two instructors who were holding on to me as we left the plane, but would be gone by the time I had pulled the ripcord. I could not think of anything during the next few months except my next jump. I would pass one level and move on to the next, making one jump each weekend, and on November 10, 1990, I was certified as a solo skydiver, with 13 jumps total under my belt.

My life had changed so much, because it was all I could think about. I bored my friends by recounting each experience over and over, and soon I made friends at the Drop Zone, because they would listen to me, tell me their stories, and my non-skydiving friends became less important to me. Every weekend as soon as I woke I would get in my car and drive an hour to the DZ, spend the day there learning, learning, always learning more about skydiving. By the time I had 35 jumps I had purchased my own equipment.

Just to show you how hooked I was: in 1991, my first full year of skydiving, I made 301 jumps. Some people, I found, get consumed like I was, but most are not. It's probably a good thing, because life as I had known it before I made that fateful jump was never the same. Skydiving had become my reason for living, and I gained so much pleasure and enjoyment from it that I felt I would never stop skydiving for any reason. All of my friends were now skydivers.

I spent time on the Internet reading about skydiving when I couldn't skydive. There was a news group called rec.skydiving that I read every day, faithfully, and I met a fellow skydiver there who fascinated me with his posts about skydiving. He wrote right directly to my heart, my mind, and I began to email him privately. We told stories about ourselves to each other, and we were the same age, but he had almost 3,000 skydives and I was a beginner with only a few hundred.

We began to talk on the phone, and then decided we had to meet. He lived in San Francisco and I lived in Boulder, so we started a series of plane trips back and forth. I loved him before I ever laid eyes on him. Yes, this person is my Smart Guy, who is lying in bed sleeping next to me as I write this on my laptop, twenty years later.

Next I'll write about our courtship, marriage in freefall, and how I became an AFF skydiving instructor.

Loosening the logjam

In talking with Smart Guy about this blog, he helped me to understand what I'm trying to do with it by giving me the image of a logjam of emotional baggage which keeps me from seeing things that should be obvious to me. He gave me the feedback that I skimmed pretty quickly and glibly through the decade of the 1980s, which was also mentioned in some comments.

It's curious that I kept a journal from October 1981 until January 1991 -- I have them all neatly placed on my bedroom bookshelf, and I've carried them around for all these years. Sometimes I'll open one and try to find something I don't quite remember. But I can't re-read them. It hurts too much to see who I was then, a woman both naive and outwardly sure of herself but filled with remorse and shame.

My dad died of a heart attack in 1979, and when my whole family got together in Texas to say goodbye to him (he had three days from the time of the event until he died), it was my first really devastating loss since Stephen died in 1965. I remember how hard it was to go on, and how every man who looked remotely like Daddy just broke my heart all over again. But you know, eventually you heal from even the most difficult losses. He was only 62 when he died, and I'm already five years older than that.

I guess those two unresolved losses led to my willingness to begin training as a hospice volunteer. Boulder has a wonderful program, and I was one of perhaps fifty people who went through the training in the winter of 1983/84. My first experience was with the Dragos, and I wrote about it in my other blog here. I continued to volunteer for two years, and during that time I remember, among other things, bathing and shaving a man in a coma, being the only person with another man who just upped and died unexpectedly, and sitting silently with numerous others who just didn't want to be alone.

I also began to go folk dancing, a free and very enjoyable activity, in 1980. Seven of us folk-dancing women decided we needed to start a women's group. (I also wrote about that activity here, with pictures.) We met once a month and took turns being the hostess. If the women came to your house, you would provide a dinner, dessert, and decaf coffee, while the others would bring wine. (All husbands were banished from the house during the dinner.) The hostess did all the preparation and cleanup. This happened once every seven months, and the other six months you would be treated to a blissful and usually spectacular evening. This continued until I retired and moved away, although we were down to five by then: one had moved to another city and one died during the more than 25 years we met together.

I also took up meditation and ended up learning to sit for hours at a time. I miss that experience, but for whatever reason have not been able to begin again. I was able to be centered through many storms from that practice.

I just brushed over my relationship with Jamie in that last post, but I loved him desperately. We were together for more than four years, and he left me for another woman. I was totally and completely devastated for quite awhile, but eventually he broke up with her and tried to return to me. I had moved on and couldn't go back. I would never have believed it possible. The difference in our ages contributed a great deal to our difficulties; he was 13 years younger than me and wanted to try things and "sow his wild oats" in ways that no longer interested me. For many years after we broke up, we would still spend time together, and I was amazed to see how easy it is to let go when your perspective changes. We both continued to feel love for each other.

I also remembered that Chris went back to Michigan in the mid- to late 1980s to be with his father and work in the construction industry with him. Chris always had a girl friend, and strangely enough each one of them seemed to have a child, always a boy. Chris never impregnated anyone, as far as I know. He stopped using any kind of protection and hoped (I think) to have a child, but it never happened. I think I would know. When he finally married Silvia in Germany at the turn of the century, he hoped to have a child with her, but Silvia never got pregnant by Chris. So I have no grandchildren.

This picture was taken at my sister Norma Jean's home in Michigan during Thanksgiving in 1988. Chris, my mom, and Derald surround me. I am the only person in this picture who is still living.

By the time the 1980s ended, I had gone through Rolfing and lots of other bodywork, hoping to get myself connected to myself. I had begun working full time, in the same place and for the same people, but my responsibilities had moved up to being quite indispensable to the office. Everyone wanted to have me prepare their papers and help with edited volumes, although I was the writer/editor's assistant, doing the work without the title. Or the pay. But I didn't need much to be happy, and I've never cared to accumulate property. It always felt like a burden.

Sitting here in my spot in Bellingham, where I look out the window and see my bird feeders and the huge pine trees, I have around me three of those 17 journals from that decade, all of them hand-written (I don't do that any more), Birds of Washington State, and various things that give me comfort. My angel card for this period: simplicity. I pull one of these out every now and then.

Okay, I did it. I covered the decade with not so broad a brush, and I can feel it must be doing something to that mental logjam, because I feel a little fluttery discomfort down there somewhere in the middle of my stomach. I'm feeling ready to tackle the whole skydiving thing next, without carrying all this other stuff untouched...