Remembering

Although I'm tired of being sad about things, I can't help thinking about my aunt on this first anniversary of her death.  Unlike the day she died, today was gray, cloudy, and chilly.  I went by the cemetery for a few minutes after church and stood letting the wind whip past me, but it was actually too miserable to stay for long. One of my cousins is religious about visiting the cemetery.  I think she goes practically every week and neatens up  the area around the headstone.  On the anniversary of my uncle's death in June, she told me she took a bag of Frito's and a Diet Coke (one of his favorite snacks) and sat on the ground eating them, talking to him in her head.

I'm not one to do that.  I stop by their graves fairly often because I happen to drive by the cemetery on my way to and from most every place I go.  Their grave sites are visible from the road, and even if I don't stop, I do a little invisible nod of recognition, say "I miss you" in my head.

It isn't that I don't think about them.  I do, practically every day.  And I have a favorite picture of them on my piano - they're standing in my living room, flanking my son who is all dressed up in a suit and tie (it was his high school graduation day).  Their smiles are natural and happy, and they perfectly fit the image that I keep in my minds eye.

That photograph has helped me erase the images of them growing ill and infirm, the images that have been stuck in my head for the past half a dozen years.  On that day, they were proud to be part of our celebration, proud of my son who clearly held a very special place in their hearts.  On that day they were still active and healthy, and hadn't yet begun the deterioration of mind and body that would eventually take them away from us.

And that's the way I want to remember them.

More Power to You

Somewhere in the midst of yesterday's nasty windstorm, our electrical power went out.  Losing power is one of the things that makes me furious.   I take it as a personal affront, especially when it takes hours and hours for the energy company to get things back in working order.  Plus, I hate being at the mercy of some unknown entity, and being utterly inconvenienced until they have time to take care of my problem. Control issues again - I know I have them.

So we were in the dark all last evening, and though I had been dreading it, the time passed quite nicely  thanks to a long conversation with my son (which cheered me up immensely.)

But this morning when I awoke, the face of my digital alarm clock was still solid black.  No cheery red numbers announcing the return of electrical service.

Bah.

I've never made any bones about the fact that I like my creature comforts.  "Roughing it" to me means a Holiday Inn without internet access or in-room coffeemaker.  I've never had the least urge to go camping - as a matter of fact, I'd rather have a root canal than sleep out in the woods.   So, faced with the prospect of another day without electricity, I was not (pardon the expression) a happy camper.

But even I was unprepared for the depth of my surliness and malcontent.   I was grumbly, restless, and generally a huge sourpuss. I blame it partly on the fact that I couldn't get coffee immediately upon waking, and mostly on the fact that my morning routine was shot completely to hell.

If I needed any more evidence that I'm becoming an old geezer, this morning was certainly it.  Without the comforting ritual of my morning coffee, reading time, and social networking via the internet, I was like a fish out of water - dithering and flailing around, unable to make a decision or utter a nice word.  Even the bright sun etching the first crimson leaves against a turquoise sky failed to cheer me.

We finally packed up the computers and headed off to our local cafe with free wi-fi, where we took solace in a back booth with steaming cups of coffee and fresh bagels.

It wasn't quite the same as my big green chair at home, but it sufficed.

At 2:00, much to my delight, the power came back on.  My life, which had been spinning dangerously out of control for the past 28 hours, suddenly righted itself.

All's right with the world.

At least until the next time the power goes out.

The Perfect Blendship

One of my favorite types of novels are those which involve a group of friends usually coming together to help one another through a tough time.  Sometimes it involves a long standing coterie of friends (like the Friday Night Knitting Club series), other times it's people who come together in some shared activity and end up as friends (The School of Essential Ingredients was a favorite in that genre).  I love seeing friendship in action in these kinds of stories.  Also, if I'm honest, perhaps I'm looking for tips on how to make friends, or be a better friend to those I have. Apparently, friendship really is good for your health.  Recently, The Harvard Nurses' Health Study documented that the more friends we have, the less likely we are to become ill as we age.  Because I'm an only child, my friends have always been super important to me ~ they replace the siblings I never had.  Over the past 15 years, I've developed a cadre of what I consider the closest friends I've ever had.  We've bonded over our shared love of music and young people and travel and books and dogs. These are the women whom I respect most, whose advice I ask, who can make me laugh out loud even on my worst days.

With one exception, all my closest friends are about 15 years older than I am.

You know what that means, of course.  That most likely, I will outlive them all.

What happens when you outlive your friends?  I've seen firsthand evidence of that with my mother, who, at 83, has lost all but one of the friends she became close to when she moved into her current neighborhood almost 40 years ago.  When my great aunt died last year, my mom lost the closest living relative she had left, and the nearest thing to a sister she'd ever known.   Even though I see her or talk to her every day, she's lonely for someone her own age, someone who "remembers when," someone she can confide in without burdening me.

Of course friendships are volatile for reasons other than death.  I can group my friendships into several clusters over my lifetime - the childhood friends that hung on into young adulthood and then faded away; the parenting friends, the ones made during children's school days,  bonding over bake sales and field trips, which disappeared when the children grew up.  The  friendships I have now feel the strongest, and have lasted the longest, perhaps because they developed over shared interests and in the pursuit of shared goals.  We've traveled together, performed together, sat in hospital waiting rooms together, rejoiced over births, cried over deaths. They feel are (as Meredith Gray put in on an episode of Gray's Anatomy) my "people."

So I'm not at all surprised that friends keep you healthier.  Having a social network - and I mean a real live social network - provides the emotional and practical support we all need to get through life.  Friends provide the perfect blend of kindness and tough love, of inspiration and exasperation, of laughter and tears.

How could we live without them?

How about you?  Is your social network important to you?  How have your friends enriched your life?

What Matters Most

So a little time has passed, and with it some of the horribly angry feelings I wrote about here.  Your supportive comments were like balm on those wounds, proving once again that writing is good therapy, but so is the counsel of wise friends. I'm back online, with a brand new MacBook Pro, purchased in a wild spending spree yesterday that probably has more than a little bit to do with my improved outlook.  Nothing like spending someone else's money to make you feel better.  My dear husband keeps reminding me that we've been paying our insurance company premiums for over 34 years in order to reap these benefits.  That is certainly true, and I'm definitely appreciative.

In addition to the  (somewhat surprising) angry reaction I experienced, there has come a depth of awareness about what matters most in situations of loss.  I reckon you all won't be a bit surprised to learn that the despair  I've felt hasn't been about the loss of possessions themselves, for those are easily replaced.  The despair comes from the loss of those irreplaceable things that meant more to me than the items themselves.  My pictures, my documents, everything I've ever written since I began using a computer decades ago, including poems, essays, stories, and the manuscripts of two novels.   None of it was valuable to anyone but me, and the senselessness of stealing it makes the loss even more painful.  It was all diligently copied onto a small external expansion drive, just in case  my computer crashed or was lost or damaged during my travels.

Never did I imagine that someone would break into my home and steal not only the laptop, but the expansion drive as well, something that's worth about a buck (if that) on the open market, but priceless to me.

When I first heard the news about the robbery I was at work, and my mind flashed onto an image of the necklace I had left lying on the dresser earlier that morning.  It's a diamond pendant, a setting of my mother's engagement ring.  I wear it nearly every day, but on that particular day had decided to wear something different, and, in my usual rush, had left it on lying on the dresser.

"My necklace - is my necklace on the dresser?" I implored my husband, who was wandering the house looking to see what was missing.

"Your diamond necklace is there - is that the one you mean?"

"Oh yes," I gasped gratefully. "That's the one."

The things that matter most.

Priceless indeed.  The advertising guru's who created that familiar Master Card campaign were right on the money with that concept.  There is so much in life that money can't buy - much of it has to do with our experiences and the ways commemorate them.

A lot of those priceless objects were stolen from me Monday afternoon, but thankfully, not all of them.

And to paraphrase another recent advertising slogan - I'm not too worried, because I will make more.

Anger Management

Well. It's been a week here. 

Monday afternoon, while my husband and I were waiting (and waiting, and waiting) for his nephrology appointment at the University of Michigan Hosptial, there was quite a bit of excitement going on at our house.

Apparently, two men drove a battered white Escort into our driveway, walked around the back of our house, bashed down the back door, came inside and walked out with our 47 inch screen television, both of our laptop computers and both of our digital cameras.  They likely would have taken more (like some of the jewelry on my dresser or the cash in my desk) had one of our  neighbors not come out onto his driveway and spotted them, at which point they jumped into the car and took off.  He called the police of course, who came forthwith.  Very soon there were evidence officers inside our house dusting for fingerprints, while patrol officers tried to track down the vehicle (of course, to no avail).

By the time we got home, it was all over but the shouting.

My shouting, that is.

Bad as it is, there is much to be thankful for in this situation.  Both the dogs were at my mother's, so they weren't involved or hurt in any way.  Other than the broken garage door, there was not one bit of damage to the inside of my house - as a matter of fact, everything was eerily undisturbed.  Were it not for the dusty patches were the television and computers were sitting, you would never know anyone had been inside.

But I'm shouting nevertheless.

I have to confess, I'm a bit disturbed by the depth of anger and hatred I feel right now.  Those of you who know me personally, and even those who know me only by my words, would likely describe me as a gentle soul, someone who cares about others, perhaps even someone who wouldn't hurt a flea, as the old saying goes.

Until Monday, I would have described myself that way as well.  But right now, I'm so damn mad that I can hardly see straight.   I'm a person who has spent her whole life trying to do the right thing, working hard, living by the rules.  The nice things I have - the tv sets, the computers, the cameras - those are things I've worked for and earned.  And nobody - NOBODY - has the right to take those from me.  I don't care how underpriveleged you are, I don't care if your parents beat you or abuse you, I don't care if you were born addicted to crack cocaine, I don't even care if you're homeless and hungry. 

You don't get to break down my door and come into  my house and take my stuff.

No.

So right now, this gentle soul who can't bear to look when her husband kills a spider or a fly, who was sick to her stomach the one time she hit a squirrel with her car, this same person is fantasizing with great satisfaction about pointing a nine millimeter pistol at those intruders and blowing them to bits, splattering their ignorant brains all over the sidewalk.

Wow.  Scary, isn't it?

What's even scarier is the way that violence begets violence, the way even the best of us can be turned in an instant into someone filled with hate and anger, someone we don't even recognize when we look in the mirror.  There is just so much injustice, and unreasonableness, and trouble in this world we live in, I marvel that any of us makes it through the day without being overcome by anger.  We go through the motions and hold all the uneasiness at bay, suppressing our emotions with platitudes, when really we're nearly consumed with turmoil.  And yet deep inside it festers away until one day something causes it to overflow and we're lost.

My anger may eventually fade.  I may just be in one of the "stages" crime victims inevitably travel through as they come to terms with the way they've been violated and the things they have lost.  Then again, it might be that an indelible mark has been left on my soul, that the gentle person I once was has been stolen away, has disappeared into the night along with my possessions.

And that would be the greatest loss of all.