Never Forget

There are several versions of the story about my grandfather’s arrival in America. Some of them have him hidden away aboard a steamer trunk and smuggled onto a ship bound for the west.

Others tell of him running away from his village and hiding out wherever he could until he was able to meet up with an aunt and uncle who spirited him away.

Most of the stories have him ending up in France for a while, before making his way to the United States and through the portals of Ellis Island.

Though I don’t know all the details, I do know the reason for his escape. Beginning in 1915, a radical sect called the Young Turks rose to power in Turkey and embarked upon a mission to eradicate Christianity from the region. As a result, more than 1.5 million Armenian people were systematically murdered, my grandfather’s family among them.

But one son survived, and found his way to the Promised Land. It certainly wasn’t milk and honey here. He married young and had six children to feed during the Depression plus a chronically ill wife to care for. He might have wondered sometimes about the meaning of it all. Probably more often he wished for the support of his own parents and siblings, whom he left behind when he fled and never saw or heard from again. It would be hard to be on your own in a foreign land, where no one speaks your language or knows much about where you came from.

It would be even harder if you knew your family had probably been brutally killed while you had been lucky enough to survive.

April 24 is designated as  Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day, and the usual news stories have surfaced about Turkey's failure to acknowledge this episode in history as a true genocide, and the failure of other nations (our own included) to do so. I don’t pretend to understand the reasons for political palaver, but I do believe that any time a nation sanctions mass killings of innocent people they should be held accountable in some fashion - at the very least, they should suffer shame from the rest of the world.

Naturally I remember my grandfather and the members of our family who were victims of that horrible time, as well as all the other individuals who were persecuted because of their Christian beliefs. They are the very people politicians and religious leaders claim to care about, but who became the victims of misplaced ideology and rhetoric.

Any time a group of people with extremist views are allowed to gather power, innocent people are at risk of destruction.

Never forget.

Ouch

When I was a kid, I was never fond of band-aids. Oh, I know lots of children like them, especially like being  festooned with all the cute cartoon characters which adorn all sizes and varieties of bandages. Not even cute cartoon characters could make up for the things I hated about bandaids. Like the way they got all dirty and grimy looking. Or the way they came unglued when you got them wet, and would then hang limply from one end.

But by far the worst part of the bandaid was taking it off. Whether you inched it off slowly or pulled it off in one fast rip, it HURT.

Last night my husband left for Florida to pack and move our things from our home there. I was of course supposed to go with him, but because of my mother’s illness, I’m forced to stay home- at least for a few more days. As much as I’ve dreaded this week, it seems horribly wrong for us to be separated right now.  It’s one of the perogatives of marriage, I think , that painful tasks should be undertaken together.

This is definitely a painful task, and one we’ve been dreading for about a year. Our home in Florida wasn’t just beautiful and bright and new, it was also a symbol of hope for the future, a time when we would shed this gritty midwestern workaday world for the relaxed lifestyle of a tropical paradise.  It was our sanctuary, a place we could retreat and regain our sense of composure. In my darker moments I’ve likened the sale of this house to the sense of impending doom you feel while waiting for a terminally ill person to die. You know it’s coming, and part of you just wants to get it over with, even though you know it’s going to hurt.

Like the bandaid removal.

I was dreading and anticipating this week in equal parts,  just wanting to get in the house and start boxing up the dishes, taking the pictures off the walls, folding up the clothes. Have the POD delivered. Load up the furniture, the entertainment center, the dining room table and chairs. Ship it all off to storage, where hopefully it will get moved into a nice new condo out here about six or eight months from now.

Just do it all fast, quick, clean and dirty.

Rip that bandaid right off.

Because it’s going to hurt, and my eyes will fill with tears (as they are right now) and a few of them will spill over and run down my cheeks. The wound under that bandage will be red and raw for a while until a hard scab forms over it.

Eventually it will heal, and if I’m lucky the scar will be tiny. It might pain me on cold winter days when I remember the sunny retreat I once had. I might feel a twinge when people talk about southwest Florida or when I hear the word “snowbird”.

Friends will mouth platitudes about “new experiences ahead,” and I will nod politely. But it feels like in my personal grand ledger of accounts for the past five years, the loss column has mounted exponentially while the profit column remains nearly stagnant.

As I've learned from my previous experience with loss - time heals. The scar becomes just one of the many others inflicted by a disease we call "real life.” You stumble through each day, happy for the tiny moments of pleasure you get from seeing pictures of your grandchild or hearing him laugh on a video, anticipate the times when you’ll be able to pick him up and cuddle him next to you. You have dinner or drinks with friends, you listen to music, read good books, sit on the back porch with a glass of wine and watch the sunset.

The sticky residue from the bandage finally gets scrubbed away and the wound underneath pales and dries.

And then one day you’re back to normal (or whatever passes for that in your new reality), and you’ve forgotten how much it hurt to rip that bandage away.

I’m looking forward to that day.

But first this bandaid has to come off.

Ouch.

Comfort Food

Toasted cheese sandwiches on white bread. Chocolate ice cream.

Celery stuffed with peanut butter or cream cheese.

Scrambled eggs.

Corn flakes with bananas.

Potato chips and French onion dip.

These have been my menu items of choice for the past week.  Comfort food items, none of which are particularly healthy or even flavorful. But they were all favorites when I was a child, so when I’m under stress I find myself craving these simple concoctions.

It’s been a stressful week, as I hinted in my last post. We had a huge, nasty surprise with our tax bill late Monday evening, giving us just a few hours to muster up a rather large sum of money. All this occurred after spending the weekend caring for my mom, who suddenly developed severe, intractable pain resulting from a herniated cervical disc which necessitated more than one trip to the ER. To add insult to injury, Monday evening we sank onto the sofa to relax with some mindless television only to discover our TiVo had died, taking our entire stock of recorded programs with it.

And just in case you don’t think I deserve those comfort foods I listed at the start, all this has happened on the eve of our travel to Florida to pack up and close on the sale of our home there.

So hand over those chips, would ya?

Truthfully, when I’m stressed out I generally lose my appetite completely. Over the years I’ve enjoyed some major weight loss on the “stress diet.” Many people eat more when they’re anxious, but the very thought of food these days really turns my stomach. And the semi-healthy diet I’ve been attempting to follow for the past few years - more vegetables, whole grains, and fish - hold absolutely no appeal whatsoever. About the only thing that sounds palatable are the simple dishes I mentioned above - nursery food, you might call it. Food that demands little of the taste buds or the digestive tract. Food that’s easy to prepare and can be consumed while standing at the counter or perched in front of the computer screen.

I hinted at another of the reasons these foods are so appealing when I’m stressed - they were childhood favorites. During stressful times, I think it’s common to yearn for one's childhood days, when someone else handled the big worries (like taxes!) and all we had to do was memorize spelling words and remember to take out the trash. When I was little, potato chips and dip was the snack of choice for TV time with my grandparents.  On Sunday nights, I’d snuggle between them on the big old sofa in our basement “rec room” and watch Bonanza. My grandmother would put a big bowl of Lays potato chips on my lap, and set the Borden’s French Onion dip beside me. (Right about now my son and daughter in law are probably cringing at the thought of me giving Connor food like that!) Still, more than 40 years later, one salty bite takes me back to a time when I felt content and safe. These days, that’s what I need to feel more than anything.

And if I can get it from something as simple as a bag of Lay’s Potato chips, it’s worth a try.

How about you? What are your eating habits in times of stress? What foods comfort you?

Stuff

Even when you think you’ve done a good job of containing clutter, you realize that stuff threatens to overwhelm you. We’ve been making lists this weekend, mentally doing inventory of every room in our Florida house as we decide what to store, what to bring back to Michigan, and what to dispose of. Although we’ve owned the house for 10 years, we’ve never really “lived” there full time. It was always a vacation home, so we purposely tried not to clutter it up with too much stuff.

But we did furnish it from scratch (and oh, was that fun!) so we had to purchase every little thing you need to survive in a home, from wastebaskets to screwdrivers and everything in between. You’d be surprised at the things you take for granted - rubber bands, paper clips - that you don’t have in a brand new house.

As we do our inventory 10 years later, we realize that despite our best efforts we could probably start our own hotel supply company. Even though I intended to buy just the bare minimum, in a house with three bedrooms and three bathrooms, the bare minimum turned out to be quite a lot, and certainly more than I need up here in my little 1950’s style ranch house.

I don’t really have the kinds of hospitality supplies & hotel catering supplies that some folks do, but there’s a pretty good start toward setting up my own mini version of the new PeaceSuite Hotel Linen and Laundry Supply I read about online the other day. Their slogan is “take control and get organized.” Now that’s something I definitely need more of.

Life Happens

It’s been quiet here at the Byline. No clackety clack of typewriter keys in the press room, no crotchety, cigar -chewing editor barking out assignments from the city desk. But then, it’s usually quiet here - just me and my little Apple computer, tucked into my favorite chair.

Like most news rooms, a lot goes on behind the scenes. Many things happen out there in the “real world” that coalesce in my mind and finally become words on the page. Although the only editor is the very fallible one in my brain there’s an editorial type voice in my head,  an ever-present impetus to try and bring my experiences to life on the page.

Life has been writ rather large of late. Lots of stuff going on and most of it hasn’t been good. Today I compared the events of the past week with a perfect storm - a coalescence of conditions that brought a number of things to a head at the same time and created utter chaos.

And I’ll admit - I don’t do well with trauma. I’m not one of those Sadie Strong types of women who thrive when the going gets tough. I like life on an even keel, and when it isn’t I’m the first one looking for a bucket to start bailing.

But there are oh so many things from which there are no escape. Old age. Illness. Death. Taxes.

Change.

That’s the big one.

There’s a big bunch of it around here.

So things will likely continue quietly in this newsroom while I attempt to keep my wits straight and my head above the water.