Back to some poetry...

Falling

I am forgetting

already. Barely a month

and only the occasional

twinge recalls what used to be:

the worry and pain and interrupted

sleep, a life on pause,

disrupted plans, dependence.

Unable to carry or open or twist

or walk or fasten, put on or take off

anything.

A single opposable thumb.

A single functional wrist.

A single functional leg to stand on,

the other being

undependable except for pain.

Pain is reliable, I found,

mornings when I weighed pain

against the benefits of standing erect,

evenings when I debated

strategies for climbing into bed--

gone now. Gone

except the infinitesimal ache,

the pinpoint of memory,

the glimpse of the future.

I’m getting old.

Chautauqua, Year 3

We are back from Chautauqua again--the most fun one can have in a place spelled with three 'u's. (I know that makes no sense, but since when is that a requirement?) In any case, you will be relieved to hear that the little town of Chautauqua has not changed overmuch, though the campaign to build a new and better amphitheater (mousetrap?) is underway.

For the uninitiated, Chautauqua is essentially a summer camp for families: grandparents, other adults, teenagers, children, babies and all that fall in between. There are lectures, classes, music, ballet, theater, opera, literary events, and entertainment of all kinds, both popular and classical. As if this weren't enough, it all takes place in a Victorian setting: houses loaded with gingerbread and porches and rocking chairs, all with breathtaking gardens, crowded with color to the nth degree.

We have attended for one week for the past three summers, sharing a house with friends, taking turns preparing dinner, sometimes dining out and always, comparing notes. This is, I must say, the way to go. It is always a pleasure to share experiences, but this arrangement allows us time to discuss the speakers and their subjects, and to air our (various) opinions on the topics broached.

If I had to pick one thing that I most liked about Chautauqua, it is that experience. We seem to have lost the knack of serious conversation in our daily lives. I know that is an exaggeration, but I can't remember spending an entire evening discussing scientology (or the like) in the past year. We did that this week. Two lectures a day: one on the theme (The American West for this week) and one on religion. In between, there are classes on a variety of topics, ranging from history to art to technology, from yoga to zumba, from sailing to photography. The evening programs are the icing on the cake: classical music to classic movies and bluegrass to ballet. The Chautauqua experience is truly getting away from it all--and taking only the best stuff with you.

One of the best parts is that you are (for one week only) semi-divorced from the hassle of your everyday world. You don't have to drive anywhere; no one is calling you for meetings; no decision is more urgent than deciding what's for lunch.  Sit back on the porch and relax. Play 'Name that Tune' with the carillon that plays three times a day. Read a book. Look at the lake. Develop an affinity for sunsets--or sunrises. Watch the kids on Bestor Plaza wading in the fountain or pogo-sticking down the brick walk. Get an ice cream or a cup of coffee. The world can be your oyster, if only for a week each summer. You're at Chautauqua.

Home again, home again...

We are again home--without a fat pig, and emphatically without the 'jiggety-jig'. In fact, our latest 6-7 hour drive left us stiff and sore and ready for a good night's sleep. 

I have spent this spring and summer marking off chunks of calendar space and prefacing almost every statement with “After we get back from…” I have ALMOST run out of these blacked-out calendar spaces, and was starting to whip out my ever-present ‘To-Do” list for home when JC reminded me that we have two trips in the offing for the fall. I hadn’t thought about the fall. That had seemed too far away. But it is now knocking on our door…one month till Labor Day. Damn.

But, in this all-too-brief respite, lasting from now till then (with only a couple weekend trips in between!!!) I am enjoying a few generally unrecognized indulgences: my shower with the right brand of soap and shampoo; my bed with the perfect combination of sheet and blanket for the temperature on our thermostat; my kitchen, and the pantry that has all the weird ingredients for whatever recipe I choose, and the cabinets that hold the appropriate pots and pans; the drawers and closet that yield appropriate clothing for unpredictable weather… I am rejoicing in not having to read a manual to decipher the vagaries of television and internet, in walking out my gate and getting in the car without crossing expanses of parking lots and shrubbery, in being able to run a load of laundry as needed.  The little comforts of home.

Home is the place to stop and recharge, to be quiet, to re-establish a baseline, to evaluate and reset. Home is necessary. Travel is broadening--of this, there is no doubt--but coming home is not the least of its concomitant pleasures.

Apologies

I reread my post of last week--re: beautiful disasters, and in light of the distinctly non-beautiful, gut-wrenching, unnecessary and any-other-adjective-that -tries-to-convey-horror disaster that occurred recently, I am so sorry. My problems, my 'disasters', my rants are strictly of the first-world variety. I cannot comprehend the wholesale slaughter of innocents, whether in the air over the Ukraine or in the streets of Gaza and Jerusalem. There is no beauty in the death of a child. There is no rationalization for the killing of teenagers over the proprietorship of a sliver of land.

Who ARE these people? This week I am at Chautauqua, and the celebrant at the Sunday service today spoke about inclusiveness vs. the very human need to 'be right'. The scripture reading was about Jesus' disciples' complaint about non-followers healing the sick and casting out demons in Jesus' name--without being part of the twelve. Jesus gave the hard advice that they should not care; that invoking His name puts these healers and demon-drivers in the right camp, whether they were followers or not; that rejecting people with whom you disagree can be a stumbling block to your own salvation. People come to God in different ways and we need to be aware of the possibility, nay, certainty, that our way is not the only way. Okay. I can buy that.

And yet, I find it hard to accept people who believe so strongly in their own rectitude that they can discount human life. No. Make that: I find it impossible that anyone of any religion can use its principles to justify the sacrifice of anyone, much less the lives of children. I am haunted by a reporter's  description of a three-year-old child in a red t-shirt, flung into a field by a missile attack on a commercial airliner. My granddaughter is three. That child was someone's granddaughter, the light of someone's life, a mischievous face begging for candy or a toy or ice cream. A child who knew nothing of politics or religion. No god could demand her sacrifice. No god that I could recognize, anyway. No 'beautiful disaster' here.

But we are supposed to shut our eyes--pluck them out!--if seeing this and feeling hatred for the perpetrators gets in the way of walking in God's footsteps.. "The opposite of faith is certainty." If that is true, then I must have faith, because I simply don't know how this can possibly work.

O God, help thou my unbelief.

Disaster strikes..then what?

I just read an article giving "8 Tips for..." It doesn't matter what the tips were for, as most of these advice articles, or "everyday hacks" articles are usually common sense, translated by an enterprising author into sale-able format.

I am a total patsy for these articles, simply because I suck up new ideas and clever approaches like a vacuum cleaner. Most have no application to anything I'm doing, but now and then, I hit upon a useful nugget with which to amaze my friends and family. Whether it's how to fold a t-shirt professionally, or how to separate egg yolks, or how to halve cherry tomatoes, I am always eager to find a clever and easy way to do it. What can I say? I'm a useless information junkie.

In any case, I read this article and was struck by a sentence at the end, a sort of coda to the piece, admitting that most of the body of the article was gleaned from personal experience, trial and error, and the inevitable frustration of doing things wrong often enough to figure out the RIGHT way.

"I hope that each of your journeys are as beautifully disastrous as mine was."

What a concept. (I am dismissing the obvious poor choice of verbs: "each...IS" not "each...ARE") The idea resonates with me. I tend to believe that everything happens for a reason, and that usually that reason is not punishment for bad behavior. If I fall down (and believe me, I have) the experience teaches me something, even if it's only to pick up my damn feet. If I burn the peas for dinner, by god, I know the next time that I had better pay attention OR use the microwave. (And incidentally, I learn how to remove the charcoaled peas from my favorite saucepan (boil water with baking soda, then scrub, scrub, scrub..) 

But..."beautifully disastrous"?  Yes. Every disastrous lesson I learn--and there have been a lot--in hindsight makes a pretty good story. Seeing the humor in the mundane crises, the slapstick that passes for daily life, the utter idiocy of most events makes it all a lot easier to handle. Nobody likes tales of woe, and if you listen to those tales long enough--even if they're your own, told only in your head--depression sets in and it gets harder and harder to get out of bed in the morning. Better by far to embrace the disastrous and think of it as gathering material for your next act, be it comedy or drama. I really believe that, if it were not for the (perceived) disasters in my life, I'd have missed out on some of the best parts.

Not to be a pollyanna about it, but there are silver linings to even the darkest clouds. You might have to wait a while and get some distance before you see it, but it's so trite because it's so true. So, here I am, wishing everyone great success...but, if that fails, I wish you beautiful disasters.

All thumbs? I wish.

All right. Guilty. I’m a self-centered and self-absorbed idiot who doesn’t really count her blessings. Or even notice them much until they are taken away. I don’t think I’m TOO different from most people, however, so here I am to testify. Amen and hallelujah.

I’ve spent the last two weeks trying to avoid pain. It is a full-time job. There were days when I didn’t want to get out of bed because it hurt. There were moments when I seriously weighed how hungry I was vs. how much it would cost to get up and walk into the kitchen. Like the old joke about old age, if I bent over to do something, I wondered what else I could do as long as I was down there.

I have had a couple of falls in the past two weeks, the middle one of the three resulting in a possibly broken wrist, which meant about a week in a cast before the orthopedist I finally saw commuted my sentence to a removable splint for a couple weeks, pending a second x-ray. That was bad enough, and it caused me to re-evaluate my left hand, particularly my fingers and thumb—as indicated in a previous post. The new splint allowed me to return to some (not all!) normal activities like washing my hair, holding a blow-dryer, picking things up, typing with two hands… But I was not destined to get off that easy. No sooner had I tasted a modicum of freedom than..I tripped again. Over a speed bump in a parking lot. Yes, God, I see you laughing.

THIS time, in a supreme effort to avoid landing on my injured wrist and definitively breaking it, I managed to wrench myself to my right side, land on my hip and pull muscles (I thought) in my right leg and rib areas. Getting up from the parking lot surface would have provided fodder for You-tube. But the aftermath wasn’t funny. It hurt to walk. It hurt to turn. It hurt to sit down. It hurt to stand up.  Getting into or out of bed required strategic thought.  I never realized how many separate actions—all requiring muscle movement—were involved in getting out of bed. Try—just try—getting up without pushing against something with your hand, or swiveling your legs or torso. It ain’t easy. Getting dressed is no party either. Buttons, hooks, zippers, ties…hard to do without two fully-operative hands, though much more possible than with a single one. God bless elastic and Velcro and cotton knit shirts that stretch. But even if physically do-able—it hurt. Every morning, I’d gather up my determination and decide to get up and get dressed, no matter what, because, sooner or later, I’d be back to normal.

That isn’t a hope that the elderly have, for the most part. Their aches and pains are there to stay, and gradual improvement and eventual recovery isn’t in the cards. Or even in a pill bottle, no matter how many medications they have in their arsenal.

So, thank you, lord, for a preview of old age, for making me see what the world was like for my mom and is for others like her, who face this sort of stuff every day with no end in sight.  I know my bones and my bruises will gradually heal (praise god) and I will go back to my previous heedless carryings-on.  But I will have had this warning to stop and look and pay attention to where my feet are, to get myself to a place where I have better balance and flexibility so I will perhaps bounce instead of break the next time gravity plays tricks on me. At least I hope so.

But for now, I’m counting blessings-- having someone with the patience to help me do all the things I can’t; having medical care to ease all the middle-of-the-night worries that march through my mind like determined sheep, leaping fence after fence while I try to sleep;  avoiding that broken hip, the dual broken wrist scenario, the head injury, and all the other mind-numbing possibilities that inhabit the darker recesses of my brain.

Oh boy, I’m lucky.