Getting A Blessing

It was one of the singular pleasures of my girlhood, a trip out to my Aunt Lil's house. The 30 mile car ride to her little house on Elizabeth Lake was an all day affair, and we'd start out about 10:00, my mother, my grandmother, and my Aunt Lissie.  I'd clamber eagerly into the back seat with a book tucked securely under my arm.  My grandmother always had a paper grocery sack filled with home baked goodies, because of course one never went visiting without taking something to eat. I remember the ride down Telegraph Road, the parade of stores and restaurants  finally giving way to lakefront views and tiny cottage size homes.  Occasionally I'd have dozed off in the back seat, the gentle motion of my aunt's big Buick sedan rocking me to sleep.  The crunch of tires on Aunt Lil's gravel road always woke me quickly, for I knew we were nearly there.

She usually heard us coming, my aunt did, and would burst through the screen door of the little gray shingled house, untying her faded apron, or wiping her hands on a clean cotton dishtowel.  "There you are!" she'd call gaily.  "Hurry on in, lunch is on the table!"

I have no idea why those lunches around her big kitchen table were so exceedingly good. Usually they were quite similar to our lunches at home - cold cuts, like boiled ham or that corned beef you get in the can which opens with one of those miniature keys, a dish of crisp lettuce leaves, radiant red garden tomato slices, and sweet bread-n-butter pickles.  A loaf of fragrant, fresh baked bread was often sliced at the table, and strongly brewed iced tea was poured into tall, slender glasses with a pattern of leaves stencilled gracefully on the edge.  I would sit, happily munching away at my sandwich while the women's voices rose and fell harmoniously around me.

"Wait 'til you see the material I got at Penney's yesterday,"  someone would say.  "I'm going to use it for curtains here in the kitchen."

"Did you talk to Jen yet?" another voice would ask.  "Have you heard what that boy of hers is up to now?"

"I swear, I cannot get Carl to stop smoking" - this from my grandmother, who was on an eternal quest to rid my grandfather of the habit that would eventually (as she always promised) be "the death of him."

So I absorbed their conversation along with my lunch, the cadence of their voices nurturing my soul as their food fed my body.  By modern standards, their lives were simple and commonplace, yet the ordinary events of their days seemed almost magical to me and certainly filled me with a sense of security and comfort. The memory of those times around the table is as vivid as if it were yesterday, rather than 45 years ago.

Today, a sparkling fall day, with the last of autumns glory clinging to the trees etched golden and ruby red against the brilliant blue sky, my mother and I took the drive out Telegraph road to say our final goodbyes to my Aunt Lil, who died last week at the age of 92. 

Much was said today about her ability to cook and her love of "putting on a spread."  We all remembered holiday dinners around her table, when she and my grandmother would vie over who could put the most food on one surface and still leave room for plates and silverware.  Many people recalled her energetic spirit, her love of "visiting" with her friends and working in her church.  Stories were told about her annual car treks back and forth from one daughter's home in Texas to the other daughter's home in Michigan - a journey she made alone each year, driving in her little Plymouth, taking only the back roads and stopping at least 10 times to visit friends and family along the way.

She leaves two daughters, seven grandchildren, and nine great grandchildren - a good legacy, I think.  A few years ago, she gave me some advice I've called upon quite often.  She was talking about some volunteer work she'd been doing at her church, saying it had become something of a chore because the people she worked with tended to whine and complain about everything.

"Honey, I was coming home every week just mad at the whole place," she said in her Kentucky accent, made even broader by the years she'd lived in Dallas.  "And I thought to myself -why, if I'm not getting a blessing from this, I shouldn't be doing it at all." 

I've found myself using this criteria for a lot of things in my life, and it's helped me to put some of them in a very different perspective.

And so one more of the old guard in my family is gone.  But I'll remember her energy and spirit, the sound of her laugh which rang out over everyone else's.  I'll think of her when I go shopping, for she loved to wander the stores and looked forward to getting a new outfit each season.  I'll recall her wisdom and strength, her kindness and good humor.

And most of all, I'll remember those summertime lunches around her kitchen table, and the warmth that spread right into the heart of a little girl, to dwell there forever. 

I surely got a blessing from that.

The Age Factor

My friend Millie is quite a bit older than I - in fact, she's old enough to be my mother.  Somehow, though, I always think of her as a contemporary.  She's stylish, fit, active in all aspects of life, and she keeps a schedule that makes me tired just thinking about it! Millie is one of my musical mentors...she taught me everything I know about playing handbells, shepherded my acceptance into Classical Bells, encouraged me to do all the kinds of things I didn't think were possible.  We've traveled together, lived together, shared lots of laughs over hot coffee in the morning and glasses of wine in the evening.

Although I no longer perform with Classical Bells, Millie and I are stand partners in our church bell choir, a group she herself directed for many years (played in and directed at the same time, I might add, and that's no mean feat!)

Last Sunday we played in church for the first time this year, and I was forced to accept something I've been noticing for a while.

She's not as sharp as she used to be.

Oh, she's fine in rehearsal, but when the pressure of performance time hits, and she gets a little flustered, things go wrong.  She loses her place, or picks up the wrong bell, and then she gets more flustered and perhaps turns two pages.  And then, it's pretty hard to recover. 

Now you'd never guess it to look at her, or listen to her speak, but my friend Millie is 72 years old.  And when you reach that age, it's pretty inevitable that the brain synapses aren't going to fire as rapidly as they once did, that change is going to be a bit harder to handle, that stress is going to take a bigger toll than it once did.

So, why am I telling you all these things about my best friend, whom I love so dearly?

Because the man who could be President of this country is also 72 years old.  Should he be elected, in the ensuing four years he will face unparalleled stresses on his mind and body.  People aren't talking a lot about the age factor in this election, but they should be.  A man that age, particularly one who has already suffered some pretty significant health problems, has absolutely no business running a country, especially one in huge crisis.

When my friend is pressured, gets flustered, and loses her place, it's not a big deal.

But if it happens to the leader of the free world, it's a very big deal indeed.

Marathon

My apologies for the late posting this week...I have been inundated with work, and the past few days have been a marathon of writing (of the medical, technical variety).  My daylight hours have been chock full of typing and paper shuffling, and last night during the time when I usually put the finishing touches on Write On Wednesday's post, I was sleeping blissfully in my easy chair. C'est la vie.

Speaking of marathons, there is a real writing marathon about to begin, the equivalent of the Boston 26 miler run in a chill November wind.

It's called NaNoWriMo.

Short for "National Novel Writing Month," it's an internet based writing venture whose participants pledge to write 50,000 words (a 175 page novel) between November 1 and midnight, November 30. 

Valuing enthusiasm and perseverance over painstaking craft, NaNoWriMo is a novel-writing program for everyone who has thought fleetingly about writing a novel but has been scared away by the time and effort involved.

Because of the limited writing window, the ONLY thing that matters in NaNoWriMo is output. It's all about quantity, not quality. The kamikaze approach forces you to lower your expectations, take risks, and write on the fly.

Make no mistake: You will be writing a lot of crap. And that's a good thing. By forcing yourself to write so intensely, you are giving yourself permission to make mistakes. To forgo the endless tweaking and editing and just create. To build without tearing down.

In 2006 and 2007, I completed the challenge.  Although I'm not a runner, I believe the experience was something akin to getting through one of those long races...the initial excitement at you start out with chapter one, the miles midway when it feels as if your heart (and head!) will burst with the effort of slogging through the daily 1667 words, the moment when your second wind kicks in with a brave new idea or direction for your story, and the final rush of adrenaline when the your word count hits 40,000 and you glimpse "the end" in sight.

What do I have to show for all that work?  My "trophies" - sheafs of typed pages neatly bound in paper folders and tucked away at the bottom of my bookshelf  - will probably never be read by anyone other than my grandchildren, who may run across the pages when they're clearing my belongings out of the nursing home.

The other "trophy" - the sense of accomplishment, albeit a private one, the sense of satisfaction that, yes indeed, there was a completely evolved story residing inside my head which I was able to coherently put it on paper in the space of 30 days - well, that one I get to carry around with me forever.

Although I'm taking this year off from NaNoWriMo, I'll be here on the sidelines cheering on all the participants as they pound the keyboard in their race to the finish line. 

Write On.

So, how about you?  If you've done NaNoWriMo, what was the experience like for you?  If you've never done it, do you think you could?  Do you have a novel residing in you somewhere, waiting to get out?

A Clarion Call

"This country and the dream it represents are being tested in a way that we haven't seen in nearly a century. And future generations will judge ours by how we respond to this test. Will they say that this was a time when America lost its way and its purpose? When we allowed the same divisions and fear tactics and our own petty differences to plunge this country into a dark and painful recession? "Or will they say that this was another one of those moments when America overcame? When we battled back from adversity by recognizing that common stake that we have in each other's success?

"This is one of those moments. I realize you're cynical and fed up with politics. I understand that you're disappointed and even angry with your leaders. You have every right to be. But despite all of this, I ask of you what's been asked of the American people in times of trial and turmoil throughout our history. I ask you to believe – to believe in yourselves, in each other, and in the future we can build together."

~From Barack Obama's speech in Richmond, Virginia

My Little Psychopath

It's been a while since I've written about her, a former music student, now special ed teacher, but with so many deep seated psychological problems that for the past two years she's been on a revolving door into the psychiatric ward.  She calls me periodically, usually crying, to let me know that she's "not doing well" or has "tried to hurt herself." One of those calls came in about a month ago - she was hospitalized after a suicide attempt, and she was calling me from her room.  Her car had been impounded, she said, sobbing, and she didn't know how to get it out.  

I know she wanted me to help her, but those were the days leading up to my mother in law's death, and in all honesty, I was just tapped out. 

"You need to call your mother," I told her.  The girl does have a mother, even though their relationship is apparently god-awful.

"I'm afraid!" cried.  "She'll only make it worse!"

"Then talk to the social worker at the hospital, and find out what to do," I counseled. 

"Okay," she says, the flat, resigned tone I've come to expect whenever I offer advice of any kind.

I called my friend Pat, who, knowing my situation at that time, agreed to go out to the hospital and see her. 

The next night, very late, the phone rang again. 

"I called my mother, like you said," came her voice, low pitched, dark, and completely flat sounding - the scariest sounding voice I ever heard.  "She came here and brought me some money."

"Well, that's good, isn't it?" I asked hopefully.

"Yes," she answered.  Then, after a long pause, the dark voice continued.  "Here's the thing," it went on in my ear, "the thing about my mother.  When I was little, and then when I was a teenager, and even now if I go home, she gets into bed with me and she's naked and she touches me."

Dear God. 

Obviously I am in way over my head.

And that's "the thing"...this girl is supposedly getting treatment at one of the finest medical facilities in southeastern Michigan.  Why is she calling me on the phone from her hospital room?  Why is she attempting suicide right outside the building after leaving a session with her therapist?  Does that make sense?

Anyway,  that was last month. 

Last night, after a particularly grueling day at the office (which you'll hear about eventually, I promise), she calls again.  She's sobbing (and driving) which is so often the case.

"Things are just so hard right now," she says, gasping into the phone.  "My classes are so bad, there are so many kids who are violent and have to be restrained, and it's impossible to teach, and I just feel so suicidal I can't do anything."

"Where are you now?" I ask. 

"On my way home from therapy," she answers tearfully.

I know that's at least a 40 minute drive.  So I did my best to redirect her attention to something other than killing herself.  We talked about finding something to do each week that she would enjoy, we talked about her years in college, and how she felt better during that time than any other time in her life, we reminisced a little about funny things that happened during high school, and how they had seemed so bad at the time and now we were laughing about them.

After about 20 minutes, I could tell she was done talking.  She hadn't eaten since noon (this was about 9:00 p.m.) and I convinced her to go through the Wendy's drive through.  She assured me she was allright to continue on home.

"Thank you for talking to me," she said softly.

"It's okay," I answered.

"I love you," she said - she always says that at least once.

"I love you too," I replied.

And I do ~ she's a sweet natured, brilliant girl, who has never felt she was worth anything.  She's obviously in need of some unconditional love and support - the kind you're supposed to get from your mother.

I get really angry at people who mess up their children.  I know we all have "issues" of our own, but people who damage their own children- psychologically or physically - just don't get any excuses in my book.  There's no exemption for that kind of behavior, no matter what your problems are.

And I'm worried that somehow this girl is getting lost in the system, that without an adult to advocate for her, she's not getting the treatment she needs or the kind of advice to help her get her life on track. 

Ultimately, of course, I'm worried that I'll fail her too - that one day my conversational gambits and lame attempts to play therapist simply won't cut it, and she'll succeed in her quest to  escape from a life she continues to find more and more untenable.

And that's the biggest fear of all.