Wisdom Learned from Tom and Della

I can't believe I have never posted this before.  My parents are two of the wisest people I know.  Here is a compilation of their best bon mots for your own personal resource library.  If you nail it to the wall of the kitchen, you'll always have it available for handy reference.

 

Always look in the direction the car is moving.
If you clean up the kitchen as you go, it is clean when you are done cooking.
A slice of potato in the doughnut fryer cleans the fat, and you can eat the potato afterward.
Always carry a calculator and nail clippers in your pocket.
You can make a great fort out of a table, three chairs, two blankets and a sheet.
Iron the collar last.
Do not be afraid of butter when making a sauce.
Spend money on really good ingredients.
It is more important to spend time with friends than to sleep.
Spend money on ephemera, like trips to Europe.  It is worth getting a second job to have the money, too.
Play music loudly so everyone can hear and enjoy it.  You can do housework or just sit and listen.  It’s all right to insist that people stop and listen to the really good parts.
Reading is fun.  Poetry, history, recipes, short stories, novels, maps, science fiction, and comic books.
Opera is a good thing and it’s not just for stuffy rich people.
Magic is real, including ancient, arcane Egyptian practices, thiotimiline, and fairies.  How do you know elves don’t exist if you’ve never seen one?
You must eat pickled peaches at Thanksgiving.
It is worthwhile to spend three days making a special dish, like sauerbraten.
You can’t make enough potato pancakes or lefse.
Keep the water running when it’s below freezing outside.
Always keep your options open.
You don’t have to do something just because you’re good at it.
It is not hard to make homemade chocolate pudding.
Use the good dishes.
Cover the blueberry bushes with netting so you’ll get some blueberries.
Sing loudly.
It is always a good time to play the ukelele.
Grind the coffee beans the night before.
Lift from your knees.
Cooking is an end until itself.  It is recreational, social, and creates works of art.
It is important to spend chunks of time and money to gather friends for talk, food, and drink.  Do it often.
Be nicer to your spouse than anyone else you know.
Toothpaste will stop mosquito bites from itching.  Usually.
If you have hiccups, drinking a glass of water in a steady rhythm will make them go away.  Every time.
Don’t open the door to the dark room.  All the dark will leak out.
When playing gin rummy, discard the high cards first.  But sometimes you can panic your opponent into error by throwing a low card early.
Talk to your spouse a lot.  Make sure you spend a lot of time with him or her.
If you walk by a weed in your yard, pull it.
Be involved in your community, your street, your city, your state, and on the national level.  Make things better, no matter how busy you may be.  Stay informed.
Make friends with all kinds of people, all colors, ages, backgrounds, religions, nationalities, and professions.  Most people are good, kind, and interesting.
Learn new things – how to cook a complicated dish, deciphering land use regulations, a language so you can travel somewhere you’ve never been before.
Let go of things you don’t need.  Make room for something new.  Or just enjoy the empty space.
You don’t always need a coat.  Sometimes it’s okay to just be cold for a few minutes.
Pay attention to how you look.  It’s fun to dress up.
You can clear a stuffy nose by standing over a steaming kettle with a towel or a newspaper over your head.
Gargling with salt water eases a sore throat.
Write.  Stories, poetry, and letters.  Show them to people.
Sing to, and with, your children.  Sing harmony.
Share new recordings with your family.  Rock and roll, jazz, Sibelius violin concertos.  It doesn’t matter as long as you are excited about it.
Take pictures.
You don’t have to heat the whole house.  Light a fire or put on a sweater or go out for a walk to get warm.
Growing some of your own food is not that big a deal.
Camping is fun.  Keep a box stocked and ready go to.
Spray the tablecloth with water before you iron it.
It’s not a big deal to bake a birthday cake from scratch.  Black Midnight is the correct cake, although June birthdays may prefer strawberry pie.
If you use a lot of something, figure out how to get it wholesale.  Sometimes you can get others to go in on it with you.  This works for cheese, beef, wine, beach condos, and lots of other things.
Don’t bother with mixes or frozen food.  Food made from scratch tastes a lot better and usually it’s surprisingly easy to make.
Popcorn should be made in a pan, not a microwave.
Cold pizza makes an excellent breakfast.
So does popcorn.
Radishes and green onions are good with a little salt in the palm of your hand.
Sprinkle pepper on your buttermilk before you drink it.
Learn more than one language.
Recycle, even if it’s not convenient.
You don’t have to follow a recipe too closely.  Sometimes it’s okay to guess.
You can make up recipes.  It’s good to write them down.
You can design your own house or dress pattern.
If some things are in a routine, it gives you more brain space for the other things.
Don’t cook the eggs or the coffee too long or too fast.
You can choose how to live your life.  You are not stuck with what you did before or what your family or friends thought was normal or inevitable.
It’s okay to spend money on new cooking equipment.
The candle will stay in the holder if you drip wax in it first.
Antique furniture often costs less than furniture from Ikea, and it’ll last longer, too.  It already has!
What you cook at home usually tastes better than restaurant food.
The family eats together every night.
There should always be a candy bar on a shelf in the cupboard.  You can slice pieces off of it.
A batch of chocolate chip cookies makes anything better.
You don’t need a lot of champagne to make it flow in the streets.  Scraping it with your toe makes it go farther.
You must play a bagpipe recording really loudly on New Year’s Eve at midnight.  Open the door so the neighbors can share the experience with you, and to let the New Year in.
Ketchup is good on scrambled eggs.
Make your own syrup with brown and white sugar.
And my personal favorite…if the pasta sticks to the wall, it has cooked too long.

There.  If you nail this list to the wall, it will be  handy for reference, although you may eventually want to memorize it.  

I'm Not the Wreck of the Hesperus

Dr. Oz, say it ain't so!

I've just read my third article in a month about how many Americans think it would be a bad thing to live to be 120.

It'd be depressing because the world is going to hell.  You'd be old forever.  It's bad for society.  We're overpopulated!  The Baby Boomers and the Greatest Generation need to die off so the younger people can have their jobs.

All right.  I am fifty seven -- let's spell that out folks, f-f-f-f...can't do it.  All right.   Deep breath.  FIFTY SEVEN, and I'm starting to take this personally.

I agree that overpopulation is a problem.  I'm in the middle of writing a book where 90% of the human race dies off, and this tragedy, ironically, ushers in a new Golden Age.  Let's agree that there are two or three times as many human beings as the planet can sustain comfortably.

But I don't agree that my stubbornness about checking out causes overpopulation.  There are a lot of complex reasons why we have too many people on this planet.  From what I understand, it has to do with, among other things, a drop in infant mortality, a lack of options for women worldwide (I'm talking education and equal rights, folks), access to clean water and antibiotics.

Yes, a higher life expectancy is also a factor.  But maybe the answer to overpopulation is more complicated than lowering our expectations of how long we can live healthfully if we're interested in carrying on.   Could we educate women and allow them to work and give them the resources they need to control how many children they have?  And once children get here, can we be intelligent about how many resources they use?  I think it's ironic that this keeps coming up here in the United States, where five percent of the population uses 25% of the fossil fuel.  After all the fuss about Grandma and the alleged Death Panels, I don't understand why I'm now getting the message of "Here's your hat, what's your hurry?"

We need to stop working so younger people can have our jobs?  Really?  Have most thirty-year-olds mastered the skill sets that I have?  Amassed the experience, the wisdom?  I've lived three adult lives for their one.  They are doing different jobs, jobs that I outgrew a generation ago.  And all these jobs need to be done, because the more people there are in the world, the more people we need to take care of everybody -- we staff each other.  Living longer is only a problem if we decide to sit around for the last half of our lives and let other people take care of us.  If you're going to live to 120, why would you stop being productive at age 65?  Sit around for 50 years?  Please.

And why would an older person be a less valuable consumer, a less valuable volunteer, family member, counselor?  I assume that you'd get 50 more years of health and vigor with 50 more years of life.  I could understand a reluctance to sit around being spoon-fed Cream of Wheat for half a century.  But I don't think that's what we're talking about here.   The science of aging is exploding.  Researchers are completing large-scale studies that clearly show that what we think of as "aging" is actually just cumulative dis-use.  Eat well, move vigorously, stay connected and productive and you will double or triple your chances of living healthfully into your eighties and beyond, effectively extending middle age.  I know that I am more healthy and energetic than I was in my twenties and thirties.  And yes, I like walking four miles a day and lifting weights twice a week, and I don't miss ice-cream, much.

It's bad for society to have older human beings around?  In many parts of the world, it's understood that when you live a long time, you become wiser.  Your talents, skills and experience all create a nice synergy and the younger set tend to seek you out for advice.  The long-lived ones are considered to be a precious resource.

I don't know why this isn't the case in this country.  I've been bumping into age discrimination since I was in my early thirties -- I was trying to make a career as a performer at the time -- in my forties when I entered grad school and was told at one school "We're uncomfortable with older students" and faced blatant age discrimination at another -- into my fifties where I have to edit my resume very carefully to hide the fact that I'm old enough to still be mad at President Ford for pardoning Nixon.  I've been told that I'm "ageless," and that's nice, but why do I have to look younger than my years?  Why isn't it good to look my age?  Is there something wrong with it?  (I happen to think I look great.  Not for my age.   For me.)

Finally, the argument that it will be depressing because the world is going to hell in a handbasket...people, I have been depressed about the state of the world since I was a teenager.  Between the ages of six and sixteen, I lived through the 1960s and early 1970s.  My heroes were being assassinated, we witnessed riots and murders associated with according U.S. citizens civil rights, students were shot on the Kent State campus on their way to class, and we were just really beginning to be concerned about possible damage to the planet (Silent Spring was published in 1962, and then there was Carl Sagan and his writings on nuclear winter the year my first child was born).  I lived through the Vietnam War and the Cold War.  Even the advent of rock and roll couldn't disguise the fact that those were not happy times. 

It's never happy times, though.  My parents and grandparents lived through the Depression, the Dust Bowl and the first two World Wars, and I don't think those were a chuckle-a-minute years, although they made for some great stories.

The world, as I keep noticing despite all my best efforts, still isn't saved.  As a matter of fact, it seems to be getting messier.  But isn't it possible that people of my generation could be helpful in fixing it?  I read recently that on the whole, people of my generation are more concerned about the ecology of the planet Earth than the thirty-somethings demographic is.

If you're one of my age cohort or older, I want to say:  Depression, apathy, loneliness, being unproductive -- these problems aren't necessarily age-related.  You are not a number.  You have some control over how healthy and productive you are.  Don't let the wrinkles and gray hair scare you.  You didn't let pimples ruin your life, did you?  (Don't answer that.)  Jerome Hines made a comeback at the Met in his 80s.  The great Wagnerian soprano Kirsten Flagstad was 40 when she made her Met debut and recorded the definitive Isolde at the age of 63.  (In case you don't know, singing Wagner should qualify as an Olympic event).

If you are younger than I am, be aware that an accumulation of wisdom and knowledge, and comfort with yourself and the world, IS age-related.  Enjoy it as it comes.  Enjoy us, the long-lived ones.  Get to know us.  We're actually pretty cool.  Don't be afraid of us -- we're you, or at least, you're going to be us, pretty soon here.

And don't show us the door.  We've earned our right to be here.  And you need us.

Gifts

(I admit it’s a little late for my annual solstice post, but better late than never.)

I am sitting under a quilt in my living room, listening, as I have for the past forty years, to the Christmas Eve service broadcast (live!) from Kings College, Cambridge.  
 
“Adam lay ybounden, bounden in a bond; four thousand winter thought he not too long.  And all was for an apple, an apple that he took, as clerkes finden, written in their book.  Ne had the apple taken been, ne had never our ladie been heav’ne queen!  Blessed be the time that apple taken was, therefore we moun singen.  Deo Gracias!”

I've sung this ancient carol before, and I love listening to these Old English words in the candlelight.  As I sit in the pre-dawn dimness, I can see the congregation all those thousands of miles away in the English twilight.  I can hear them rustling and coughing in their seats. I see the adorable-looking boy sopranos in their starched cassocks and surplices.  (Although having been the choir mom for a men and boys’ choir, I know that this is “surface cute.”  The contraband magazines in their music folders are not the kind of reading material you expect pink-cheeked boy sopranos to be reading, until you realize that they are 12- and 13-year-old boys.)

But I get to thinking about the words of the carol.

“Blessed be the time that apple taken was, therefore we moun singen.  Deo Gracias!”

What?

Isn’t that the “original sin” we keep hearing about?  Why was this apple-taking a good idea?

Because “Ne had the apple taken been, ne had never our ladie been heav’ne queen!”

Oh, that's right.  I forgot about that whole redemption thing.

Then I got to thinking about Sleeping Beauty.  (This follows…it’s  Christmas, right?   The magi brought gifts…we give presents on Christmas…the good fairies gave Briar Rose gifts of beauty, wit and musical abilities…good.  Glad you’re coming along with me on this.) 

Remember, Briar Rose’s parents didn’t invite the bad fairy to their new baby’s party?  So she got mad?  So when the good fairies gave her all the nice presents, she decided that the baby would prick her finger on a spindle and die when she was a teenager?  The last good fairy, you remember, was able to modify this gift a little bit…instead of dying, Rose would sleep for one hundred years, when a prince would wake her with a kiss.

(Scholars of Grimm’s fairy tales, if this isn’t EXACTLY the way you remember it, give me a break.  I’m not even going into how this story is constructed of bits and pieces from earlier myths and stories, including Brunnhilde.)

And of course, despite her worried parents burning every last spinning wheel in the kingdom (and just what did everybody do for clothes, in this pre-industrial age, with no spinning going on for fifteen years), Rose managed to find the only spindle in the entire kingdom – isn’t that just like a kid – and pricks her finger on it and falls asleep.  And so does everybody else.  The rose bushes grow up over the castle.

At this point in the story or the movie, everybody says, How Awful!

Well, no, think about this.  Because she falls asleep for a hundred years, Rose awakens in her own future.  (She’s kind of like an early cryogenic time traveler, if you read a lot of science fiction, which I do.)  She gets to take all her family and friends and culture with her.  And she is awakened by her true love, who wasn’t even born until at least 90 years after she fell asleep.

Boy, no wonder the bad fairy got so irritated -- Malicious Gift turns into Happily Ever After!

This brings me to extended life spans.  Apparently there is a lot of talk right now about new biotechnology that may extend the human life expectancy to 120, 150 or beyond.  Just how long would most people like to live?  David Ewing Duncan did a survey, and found that, although the majority of people he asked wanted to die around 80, a few wanted to live to 120.  They had things they wanted to get done that just wouldn’t fit into a normal life span.

That’s me.  I often feel like I wasted the first forty or so years of my life.  I’ve done a little bit of everything.  Directed one musical.  Sang in one major opera production.  Acted in one film, ran one choral program, directed one choir, sang with one symphony, acted in one play.   Jeez, just settle on something, anything.  Three bad marriages.  (Two beautiful children.)  Ran a pasta company, worked for a lot of non-profits, but I never felt like I stuck with anything long enough to really accomplish anything.  If I can live to be 120, maybe I’ll finally do something significant with my life.

And those three bad marriages really bother me.  What a waste of time!

But…wait.  Each of those marriages had a gift.  George, thank you for the gift of Mozart and the musical training and opening of horizons that came because I moved to Baltimore with you.  Paul, thank you for the gift of my beautiful daughter, and for that pasta business that turned me into a real foodie.  Tim, thank you for creating a situation that forced me to realize that I can choose to be happy, leaving unhappiness and abuse behind.

The last gift those three “failed” marriages gave me was, of course, the last twenty years of happiness with Ed.  I learned how to recognize a good man when I saw him, and how to gratefully accept a good life with him.

Sometimes it takes four thousand years for the exile from heaven to make sense. 

Sometimes you have to sleep, surrounded by thorns for a hundred years, before your real life can start.

Like my daffodil bulbs, sometimes you can't bloom until you've sat in the cold dark winter, waiting for the light to dawn.  And it always does.

Like I said, better late than never.  Welcome Yule!

Past Lives, Or Are They?

I remember feeling resentful and disoriented when I took a class in U.S. History that taught the events of my childhood and adulthood out of a textbook.   It is strange to read a history book about events that I remember clearly.  Although I've been too busy working and raising children to pay attention to every little world event -- when, in 2002, my history teacher at Portland Community College introduced a discussion about the ending of the Cold War, I said, startled, "The Cold War's OVER?"

Now I'm re-reading "The Year Everything Changed," the brilliant history of the women's movement by Gail Collins.  Again, it feels strange to read about my life's events as "history."    Because the women's movement doesn't feel like history.  It's pretty recent.  My grandmother was 19 years old when women finally got the right to vote, and had to have written permission from her husband to teach school in the 1930s and '40s.  My mother was one of the first women in Portland to go "back to school" for a degree, while her own children were still in junior high.  That was a pretty radical thing to do in 1970.

And I seem to have missed the recent swing to the right among young women who feel that the women's movement was something disreputable and tiresome.  Many young women, it seems, are so far removed from what it was like before the women's movement that they can afford to dismiss it.

When someone like Hillary Rodham Clinton can go from being the wronged First Lady who has to make cookies and get the right haircut to be accepted as a worthy First Wife, even though she's uncomfortably smart and capable, to becoming a celebrated member of the U.S. Senate, to candidate for President once (and maybe twice!) and then Secretary of State, you know we've come a long way, baby. 

How far have we come, how fast?  Here are just a few examples of common occurrences among girls and women in the 1960s, '70s and '80s, drawn from my personal experience.  These were so commonplace that they weren't worth talking about at the time.   As a matter of fact, you would be thought to be unreasonable, or whiny, or irrational, or a bad sport for bringing them up, at the very least.  Or you could lose your job or your boyfriend or husband for bringing them up.  If you're under 30, you might think I'm making this stuff up.  I'm not.  Ask anybody over 50.

In 1968, my 8th grade science teacher told me that girls couldn't do well in science and math.  They didn't have the brains for it.  (My grade in science promptly fell from an A to a C, and I gave up on my dream of being a neurosurgeon.)

Also in 1968, I was sent home from a school dance because I was wearing a pantsuit with a tunic.  I could stay if I took the pants off and just wore the thigh-high tunic.  No thanks.  (I should have known better.  If a girl wore pants to school, she could get sent to the vice-principal's office to be paddled.  Bend over!)

During high school, it was understood that the girls who got leads in the school musicals got them because they spent long periods of time with the drama teacher in his windowless office.  I didn't.  I was never cast in anything but the chorus.  (I did get to stand in for the lead one year when she suddenly lost her voice halfway through the first scene of "My Fair Lady," but just for opening night.)

In 1975, my college advisor told me that "they" discouraged women from getting a secondary certificate in music (choral directing, that is) -- because "we don't believe women can handle the large classes." 

As a secretary at a major real estate management firm in 1980, I saved all my copying chores to do once a day, because going down the hall to the copy machine meant running the gauntlet of men standing in the narrow hallway who would grope me as I shouldered past them.

As a secretary in the placement office for the largest employer in Oregon, my manager patted me on the fanny, as he did every woman in his office.  I wheeled around, pointed my finger at him and said, "Never do that again."  When I asked later that year about opportunities to move up, I was told, "You'll never get out of the secretarial pool."  I noticed that two women in the office who didn't object to the fanny-patting had been promoted to interviewer.  My father was the head of Human Resources at the time, and my manager knew that.  I didn't tell my father about the incident.  The Common Wisdom was that it wouldn't do any good to complain, anyway.  This was in 1981.

In 1985, I divorced a man who was an alcoholic and wife abuser.  I was supporting a small child as a researcher in a small private college.  Because my ex-husband wouldn't leave our house and wouldn't pay the mortgage, I had to make the payments by myself, without being able to live there, essentially becoming  homeless (or at least dependent upon the kindness of family until I could sell the house).  My credit union responded by requesting the return of my credit card and immediate payment of the balance, because I was no longer a married woman.

(That was the same year that I was asked to leave the chamber choir in my church, because I was single now and that made the wives of the men in the choir uncomfortable.)

In 1988, as the development officer of a nationally renowned private school, I raised more than one million dollars in one year -- a record.  On the way to a City Club speech by the president of NOW, my boss, the headmaster, announced that he was going to fire me after the fall fundraising campaign because "a man could be more successful because the school's culture was patriarchal."  I asked for a  copy of my latest (glowing) performance review so that I could use it in my job hunt and he refused, because it proved that I had done a good job and shouldn't have been fired and he was concerned about liability issues.

Now I hear that there are worries about the imbalance in the numbers of men going to college.  The majority of people on college campuses, in law programs, medical programs, divinity schools, are women.   This is a grave concern.

Really?  A gender imbalance surely wasn't a concern when most of the people in professional college programs were men.

We have just endured an election season where the right to contraception -- not abortion, contraception -- was back on the table, where the Republican candidate for President seemed to believe that professional women couldn't work the hours necessary to be successful in a cabinet post because they needed to get home to cook dinner for their family -- I'm not even going to comment on the "binders full of women" statement -- and where a U.S. Senator was quoted as saying that pregnancy as a result of a rape was God's Will. 

And last week, a news item popped up on a local TV station.  Seems that a treatment clinic for sex offenders has been operating in an unmarked building five blocks from my house, for the past year.  This came out because of "incidents" involving men from the clinic and women and children in the neighborhood.  I was advised not to walk alone after dark  -- this would mean anytime after 5:00 p.m., in November in my city -- because, being a woman, I wouldn't be safe.

It's 2012.  I'm fifty-six -- fifty-six years old -- and I'm tired of this nonsense now.  I'm tired of it, but I still don't understand it.  Why this unremitting hostility against 51% of the population? 

I'm still taking my walks.  I'm a trained opera singer with an excellent pair of lungs, and besides, I've got my umbrella and I'm not afraid to use it.

I once read that Women's Liberation was defined as the radical notion that "women are people, too."  Yes.  We are. 

And maybe this is an artifact of my age, and maybe not, but there is part of me that is uncomfortable with posting this essay, because I am afraid of provoking comments that I'm whining or being unreasonable.  Don't be a bad sport.  Get over it.

I'm posting it.  There.  Get over it.

Seismic Shifts

When my youngest graduated from high school and left two days later for a three-month job out of state, several of my friends felt that it would comfort me if they repeated variations of the common wisdom, “He’ll come back.  They all come back.”

Maybe yours does.  Mine didn’t.  Oh, somebody who resembles Robin came back after three months of 14-16 hour days on an island with no ferry service, no electricity, hot water, wi-fi, and only intermittent cell service (and that in one spot in the middle of the woods).   I'm not saying this was a bad experience.  It wasn't, although I could tell it was hard from the few texts he sent periodically.  But it's obvious that the summer, plus the steady girlfriend, has changed him.  He makes his own plans.  He doesn’t always tell me where he is or what he’s doing.   I was sitting in the living room when he and his girlfriend were making plans to set up a joint checking account to satisfy one of the requirements for family student housing when they go to college together next year.  This is all good and right, and we knock ourselves out to raise functional, happy adults.  But succeeding in this lifelong goal has been rocking my reality, more than I ever expected.

Perhaps most pivotally, I’m no longer the most important woman in his life.   Kaylee comes first, as she should.

Then my daughter announced three weeks ago that she and her boyfriend are engaged – this was on the heels of her realizing that she’s coming up on 30 years old and that physiologically, her child-bearing years are limited. Wonderful, we like her fiancé very much and while the concept of being a “grandparent” might take some getting used to, having grandchildren is just going to be really, really fun.

Still, here’s the thing I keep stubbing my mental toe against.  My children don’t need me to feel loved or to learn how to get along in the world.

I’m not the central person in either of my children’s lives anymore.

Well-meaning friends and family members have objected to Robin and Kaylee’s plans by saying, “They’re so young.  You have to know who you are before you can have a good relationship with somebody else.”  (I get the impression that if they were just being flaky on-again-off-again teenagers, nobody would be worried about them.)  The thing is, I wonder just WHEN is that magic moment when you know who you are?  I know plenty of confused 50-year-olds.  Some of them even make bad decisions about relationships, based on no information or wrong or misinterpreted information, or delusions, wishes, fantasies or dreams. 

Or, like me, they make a decision that turns out well just because of dumb luck.

Ed and I didn’t have a textbook courtship where people could comfortably say, “That’ll work.  That’s a good gamble.”  I was 34 when I called Ed as part of a series of phone calls to recruit volunteers for his alma mater.  That’s right, we met because I was a telephone solicitor.  Really.  That’s how we met.  One of those little voices on the other end of the phone that most people hang up on. 

He was in a rocky relationship at the time, had just moved back to Portland after ten years on the East Coast and was trying to figure out if he really could make a living as a musical instrument maker.  I was in a rocky relationship, raising a toddler pretty much by myself and on medication for chronic depression, the biggest pessimist you ever saw, ricocheting from one disaster to another.  None of my friends today would have recognized me then, a really overweight business-like woman in a dark blue suit.  When Ed learned that I was the fundraiser from his high school, he said rudely, “How did you get this number?”  I had just spent a week making cold calls on people who didn’t want to talk to me.  I laughed.  It was the only response I could make short of starting to cry and quitting my job.  Then he laughed.  Then I said I liked his laugh and he said he liked my laugh and we talked for two hours on company time.  Then he became my star volunteer and we became friends and over the next two years, we both got out of those rocky relationships.  Then he looked at my fat depressed self and saw something that he could be in love with and I looked at his sincere sweet face and fell in love with him and we got married.  Next month, it’ll be 21 years.

I didn’t know who I was then and I’m not sure he knew himself well either.  We changed each other and helped and healed each other.  Neither of us would be who we are today without these two decades of being together.

And now our relationship is on the brink of “coming of age,” ha!  Actually it’s true.  Our children are grown.  We both get the senior discount at Fred Meyer.  We’ve figured out how to do weekends and vacations together, finally (since we’re both introverts, time off involves a lot of alone time, but it took a couple of decades to really figure that out. I mean, alone alone, not alone together alone).  We now know that we don’t have to be interested in the same things.  He doesn’t have to love travel and opera and I don’t have to love optics, kayaks, melodeons, inkle looms, smocking or whatever craft he’s focused on this year. 

We're lucky, we've always had a solid foundation to our marriage.  We love each other and our children; we love sharing a home and a basic philosophy toward life; and most of all, the primary concern for each of us is that we make the other happy.  And I suppose it's telling that I can't imagine life without Ed, and he can't imagine life without me.

It also helps that I think he’s just about the cutest man who ever trod shoe leather, and he still seems to think I’m pretty cute, too.

But it feels a little funny to feel more independent within a marriage.  We were joined at the hip for so long, and now we finally feel confident enough in ourselves that we feel we can afford to let each other out of our sight from time to time. 

Then there’s the ‘rents.  We are lucky, we still have them.  But like everybody else, our parents can push our buttons.  To quote Martin Seligman, the behavioral psychologist who wrote “Flourish,” and “Learned Optimism,” our parents can push our buttons efficiently because they’re the ones who installed them.  Well, that’s old news.  For years, we spent a lot of energy trying to feel like the adults we really were, trying not to care about their opinions of us, working to create our own family traditions.  But now we don’t need to, because to quote another hero of mine, George Harrison, I’m "gettin’ old as my mother.”  When did we get older than our parents?  And when did our parents start to be, not older, but old?

Ed’s parents moved into a lovely retirement facility last year.  We all thought it was too soon, but really, Bill is 80, when is it too soon?  They’re comfortable and busy and none of us middle-aged “children” need to worry about their safety and how they are dealing with the medical issues associated with aging.  My parents have just spent a week touring retirement communities and are planning on moving this year.  Well, they’re kids of 78 and 82, so this also isn’t too soon, and we’ll be happy when they, too are comfortable and busy in a place where we don’t have to worry about their safety and how they're dealing with medical issues…

We’re all on that Small World After All conveyor belt, and some of us are closer to the end of the ride than the others.  Maybe it’s the Pirates of the Caribbean ride, sudden drops and splashes and cannon fire, and the sound track does change as you go along, but there is definitely an embarkation and a disembarkation point at either end of the adventure, and I’m noticing just where I am on the ride.  And I’m farther along than I thought I was.

I’m not a-weepin’ and a-wailin’.  I’ve written plenty in this space about enjoying the back half of the game (my father once referred to the “seats on the fifty-yard line”) and boy am I aware of how lucky I am.  Just a generation or two ago, being 56 put you on the brink of retirement and old age.  I still feel like I’m just getting started and I do have at least one full adulthood ahead of me, there’s no reason for me not to be vigorous and capable for another 40 years.  Yes, I need three pairs of glasses to deal with eyes that don’t readily change focal lengths on their own, and Ed can’t hear without hearing aids, and I need to write everything down, and my feet don’t always work as well as I’d like.   I’m not new in box.  Got a few miles on me.  But I’m like a late ‘90s Honda – I’ve probably got another 150,000, 200,000 miles still.

Meanwhile, I hear rumbles.  The solid earth isn’t so solid anymore, and I wonder why it’s a little hard to keep my balance.

I’m thinking about learning how to dance.

Preparing For the Afterlife

I held onto my heavy, round, taut stomach as the car swooped around a bend on Barnes Road.  I could just make out the shapes of trees in the dim light of the August dawn, their silhouettes leaning out over the narrow road that led to the hospital.  Ed and I had left our daughter at my parents' house and were now on our way to catch another baby.  I was nauseous and intent.  I had expected to have labor pains every few minutes.  I had not expected to have one continuous contraction that didn't let up.


We burst out of the Sullivan Gulch tunnel into the hills above Northwest Portland and slid down Lovejoy, where Ed pulled into the drive-around at the hospital entrance.  I got out of the car.  Something about my gait must have tipped off the staff in the lobby, because they met me at the door with a wheelchair.  Somehow we were in a delivery room and I found myself in bed in a blue cotton gown.  "Would you like a shower?" asked Henry, the young but balding delivery nurse.


"Unnnh!" I answered.


"I don't think we have time for that," Ed said.  "I think it's going pretty fast.


Henry gave me a quick exam and picked up the phone.  "Tell Dr. Ono to come briskly."  He looked at Ed and said with a cheerful smile, "She's at six centimeters already."  Ed, holding my hand, leaned over to give me a kiss.  I patted his cheek, and then as the pain intensified, my hand closed on his beard and I started to pull.  Something about the alarm in his eyes brought me back to reality enough to  let go, and he straightened up.  Dr. Ono came into the room, smiled at us and walked over to the sink to wash his hands.


I had known Al Ono for years.  He came to my voice recitals.  He was the only doctor I ever knew who would sit and chat with his patients for half an hour.  He looked like he was from Tokyo but really he was from Minnesota.  "Dr. Ono?" I managed to say.  "Can I get something for the pain?" I was proud that I had given birth to my daughter, ten years before, without so much as an aspirin.  This time, I was sure I would need a little help.


"Sorry, Brenda, it's too late.  You're going to be having this baby any minute now."  He looked at Ed.  "It's what we call precipitate labor.  Well, we thought this kid would come fast!"  He took one final look and told me to push.


I am a trained opera singer.  I have excellent lung capacity.  When I scream, it's loud.  Dr. Ono is a music lover.  "Brenda honey, be careful of your vocal cords.  If you can't keep from screaming, at least keep the pitch low."  I modulated the scream to a low growl.  "That's better.  Here he comes!"


Ed, looking down between my legs, suddenly looked surprised.  He told me later that a perfectly formed little head had appeared, the eyes had opened, and the baby took a breath.  Although I couldn't see it, we all heard what happened next.  Astonishingly, the baby sang, a seven-note pattern alternating down and up a minor third.  "Ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah!"  Then the rest of him slithered out into Dr. Ono's hands and the baby landed on my stomach.  A perfect little boy, blinking in the light.


"Baby, baby!" I tried to gather him up in my arms to a chorus of "No, no!  He's still attached!"  I waited impatiently as the cord was cut and Robin, for that is what we had agreed to call him, was wrapped up and handed to me.


He lay calmly in my arms.  I could tell that under the overlay of baby-blue, his eyes were going to be hazel, or maybe gold.  Oblivious to the after-birth medical activity in the room, I fell into Robin's intent gaze and felt my insides contract with love.


The nurse took him from my protesting arms.  Time for his first bath.  I steeled myself for him to cry, but when they slid him into the warm bath, his arms and legs relaxed and he floated on the water, still cooing, eyes closed blissfully.


I was just two months past my 37th birthday.  Robin was a loved and waited-for baby, but still...I wasn't entirely sure how this middle-aged mothering thing was going to work out.  I had already been a mom for ten years.  My daughter and I were well past the diapers and sleep deprivation stage.  I was overweight, out of shape, and wasn't sure how I was going to keep up with a little kid.


And before the pregnancy started, Dr. Ono had more to say about this whole idea.  Did I realize that the pregnancy-related health risks go up considerably after the mid-thirties?  Did I really want to be raising an adolescent while going through menopause?


But Ed really, really wanted another child.  So heigh-ho!  I didn't have much of an idea of what else I wanted to do with the rest of my life anyway.  I'll be 56 when he graduates from high school.  Clearly we'll be talking end-of-life issues.  Poor kid, with this old slow mom.  Once he grows up, he'll leave home and then I'll just sit around and wait for death.


Well, in the first place, I didn't know anything about what my forties were going to be like.  It's ironic that during the No Life Of My Own phase, I earned a Master's degree, lost 60 pounds, wrote two books and went back to performing.   I didn't plan on having a life exploding with friends and fun and possibilities so that I screeched into my mid-fifties feeling like I was just graduating from a high-end college and I'm a first-draft pick.


But mostly I didn't know anything about who  Robin was.  I just had this idea of "having a baby."  Just some random baby sent from the other side.


But it turned out to be Robin.


I've called him my "sound track boy," and that's true.  He's the show-biz kid.  He's been singing since that first breath.  For his first grade show, he sang "Oh, What a Beautiful Morning" in front of 700 people, so professionally that the adults didn't know how to talk to him after the show.  It's all about the make-up and costumes for him.  When he was four, he wanted a beard so Ed put little pieces of masking tape all over his chin.  Oh, did that make him a happy boy!  He started channeling Harpo Marx in middle school and then went on to Monty Python in high school.  He wanted to wear a top hat to the first day of high school (I talked him out of it) and tried to pass himself off as a British exchange student his sophomore year (he would have gotten away with it, too, if everyone hadn't known him by then).  He asked for, and got, a tuxedo for his fifteenth birthday.  He sings like Nat King Cole and Frank Sinatra.  He's in a close harmony men's group, and has sung with professional choirs with Pink Martini and the Portland and Seattle Symphonies.  Once, when he got home from a sixteen-hour day of rehearsing and performing, he said, "I'm tired of music, Mom."  Then he picked up his guitar and sang old folksongs for two hours.


Then there's his big heart.  He is capable of tremendous empathy, generosity, and courage.  If he's eating something, he'll give you half of it.  If you feel sad, he will drop whatever is going on for him to listen and say something thoughtful and encouraging and give you a hug.  He once kayaked into a strong current in the Puget Sound to save two kids who, having fallen out of their own boat  into icy water, were being pulled relentlessly away from shore.


It's true he was something of a fixer-upper.  He has had three heart procedures, major orthodonture, and a foot that was two sizes smaller than the other foot.  Until he was 16 and had surgery, he had no sense of hearing in one ear and no sense of smell.  We were very thankful for health insurance.  And yes, there were times when he just wouldn't do his homework and I thought my head would explode.  I didn't like that he left milk glasses on his floor until the ants found them.  I will not miss the old sock smell drifting out his door into the living room.  And yes, I have spent the last year driving him all over town for this rehearsal and to that friend's house, and putting in dozens of hours a week volunteering for his choral program until I'm going nuts because I can't get my own work done.


But during the past year, he's learned to manage a complicated performance schedule, taught himself to play the guitar, learned to drive, and built a happy relationship with a lovely girl.  He auditioned for college music programs and was accepted into his two favorite schools.  I would say that he's at the top of his game, except that I think he's just getting ready to launch.  We ain't seen nuthin' yet.


This spring, Robin got a three-month job for this summer, working as a cook at a camp in the San Juans.  So during this past spring, I've been thinking and thinking about how quiet the summer will be.  I'll get up the morning after he leaves and what'll I do?  Then I realized it's not just the summer.  Once he comes back from camp,  he'll be home for just three weeks before we pack him up and drive him to college.  My throat keeps closing up.  My friends say cynically, "Oh, don't feel too bad, he'll come back.  They all come back."


I actually find that kind of insulting.  They DON'T all come back.  Robin wants to be out on his own so badly.  He has job skills that will allow him to make a living right away.  And besides, there's no denying that this part of our relationship will be different.  After almost thirty years, the job of mothering won't be my daily life.  Suddenly I'm being propelled into an After Life.


I always say that I'm not worried about dying.  I wasn't aware of myself before I was born and probably I won't be aware after I die.  If I'd never had children, I wouldn't feel like my heart is being pulled out of  my chest.


But I do.


Last week, Ed and I drove Robin to the ferry in Anacortes, Washington, so he could travel the last leg of his ten-hour trip to Johns Island.  He had chosen this camp because he had attended as a camper for eight years, half of his life.  Two weeks of training and setting up the camp awaited him, then cooking from 7:00 a.m. to 10:00 p.m. for three months.  From Portland to Anacortes is a five hour drive.  Robin slept most of the way, because he'd been up since 4:30 a.m. -- he'd had one last performance with his close harmony group, singing at the Rose  Festival ceremony -- what a wow finish to the year!  When he woke up, he looked a little lost.  It had been hard for him to walk out of his room that morning.


But as we entered Anacortes, we rounded a corner and suddenly, there was the Puget Sound and the wooded, rounded islands peering through the mist.  Robin smiled dreamily, tears in his eyes.  "This is home," he said.


"Welcome back," I said to him.  This is his dream job.  He loves the San Juans, he loves this camp, he loves the outdoors, and he loves to cook.  He'll be working with people he has liked and admired for years.


We pulled into the parking lot at the ferry terminal.  We got out of the car and made our way to a picnic table and sat down with our lunches.


"I see camp girls," Robin said through a mouthful of peanut butter sandwich.  I hadn't thought that, of course, half the camp staff would be catching this ferry.  "I better go get my stuff."  We went back to the car and unloaded Robin's trunk, backpack and guitar case.  He shouldered his backpack, picked up his guitar and one end of his trunk, loaded down but moving fast.  Ed ran around him to get a picture, and I have it with me now...Robin heading for his friends with a big grin on his face.


(Cue the music...)


Then we saw the ferry come around the headland.  Slowly it pulled into the dock.  Robin came trotting back to us.  Cars and bicyclists and walkers streamed past us, and then it was Robin's turn to board.  He turned, tears in his eyes, and all three of us hugged, hard.  Then we stood to the side while he pulled his luggage aboard.  He disappeared into the maw of the ferry.  We saw him again on the deck above us, standing in a group of friends.  He'd gotten out his guitar and they were already singing camp songs.  The ferry started to pull away, and he freed an arm to wave at us.


Arms around each other, Ed and I watched Robin float away across the water.  He was singing blissfully, eyes wide open.


(Music fades out...)


I'd like to say that's how it happened, but it isn't.  What happened is, I got out the sunscreen and handed it to him.  He put two streaks of sunscreen on his already red arms.  I said, "Here, let me get the back of your neck."


He looked at me, put up a hand and said, "Mom, I'm ready to say goodbye now.  I'll catch the ferry when it gets here."  He gave me a quick hug, hugged his dad, took the handle of his trunk and started rolling it down to the ferry dock where his friends were waiting.  Ed and I walked back to the parking lot and got in the car.


We drove back to Seattle.  As we were poking through the Pike's Street Market, we got a text from Robin.


I CAN SEE THE TEEPEES!


NOW I WILL TURN OFF MY PHONE.  TALK TO YOU IN THREE MONTHS.


The ride was a lot shorter than I thought it would be.  Thank you, Robin.  It was glorious.

Guns Don't Kill People. But They Help.

A young friend texted my son yesterday, requesting that he read the Metro section. Section B, page two, above the fold. We don't usually read the paper, so it wasn't until this morning that I fished yesterday's Oregonian out of the pile at Starbucks and turned to page two.

Our friend's father is the choir director at St. Michael and All Angels Episcopal Church here in Portland, Oregon. His assistant conductor, Brian Tierney, was shot last Wednesday night while driving home from choir practice. Brian is 29 years old and the father of a two-year-old. He was found in his car on the side of the highway, bleeding from multiple gunshot wounds. He is not dead. He is in critical condition, his kidney shattered, the extent of his internal injuries unknown, but he did not sustain brain damage and he may recover. He is a musician, so his wife and child will have to do without his income, and the medical expenses will be staggering.

The police have no clues as to who shot him, other than it was somebody with a gun.

The church and choral leadership are organizing meals and help with the garden and a fund to help financially. Other than that, what can we do?

This on the heels of the more global grief I've been feeling about the death of Trayvon Martin. I didn't know Trayvon. But I have a teen-age son myself, and I can't imagine what Tray's parents are going through. What happened in Florida is inexplicable. A self-appointed "neighborhood watch volunteer" can shoot an unarmed teenager to death and not even be arrested? The most dangerous thing this child did was to be black, wear a hoodie and carry a bag of Skittles and walk through a gated community? Death penalty for being a young black male and wearing a hoodie? If there were such a thing as a law that said it is illegal to be a black teenager, wear a hoodie and carry Skittles, and a judge can sentence you to death if you break that law, there would still be due process before an execution was carried out. This was murder, carried out because someone with an opinion had a gun.

Oh my God.

So stepping from the particular to the national to the big picture:

The U.S. Department of Justice has recorded an average of 29,500 gunfire deaths every year nationally for the last 30 years. Compare that to the 6,000 military personnel lost in all foreign wars during the same period of time. From 1976 to 2006, over 100,000 children have been shot to death. The National Center for Health Statistics Mortality Report reports similar statistics for 2009.

According to the Eighth United Nations Survey on crime trends (2002), Albania had 135 firearm murders in one year. Albania, now there's a safe haven. Zimbabwe, 598.

I don't know about you, but I've had it with the NRA's take on how guns make our lives safer. I don't buy it. I've managed to ignore this issue for awhile, mostly by avoiding reading the papers, but Brian and Tray got my attention.

As gun apologists like to say, guns don't kill people, people kill people. But as my favorite commentator Eddie Izzard once said, the gun helps.

A fund has been established to help Brian Tierney's family pay his medical expenses. If you want to help, you can write a check payable to "SMAA" with the notation "Brian Tierney Fund" and mail it to St. Michael & All Angels Church, 1704 NE 43rd Ave, Portland, OR 97213.

If you would like to sign a petition to the Florida 4th District State's Attorney asking for the arrest of the man who murdered Trayvon Martin, go to www.change.org/petitions.

I'm not much of a praying person, but I'm going to start praying for the soul of this country that I love. During this week when so many of us celebrate the living message of a man that many of us call a prophet or the Son of God, the message that we should take care of each other and love each other, even those who harm us, I will pray that our hearts and minds be open to the idea that the fountain of firearms available to us doesn't make us safer.

You can join me if you like.