The Inquiring Mind . . .

THE MAN I CAN'T REMEMBER

2012-04-15T11:30:00.000-07:00

THEME: DOING THE RIGHT THING

The most important human endeavor is striving for morality in our actions. Our inner balance and even our very existence depend on it. Only morality in our actions can give beauty and dignity to our lives. ~ Albert Einstein

A man changed my life one day in his office. I was one of eight or nine people he probably saw that day, certainly not the most dramatic or deeply felt for him, a university-based counselor of many years’ experience. I only saw him once, but our encounter showed me my path and gave me a nudge to follow it. I owe him a lot, but I can’t repay it because I don’t remember his name.

As my college career wound down, I was suddenly faced with the eventual dilemma of any English major –how would my ability to crank out a paper on imagery in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” translate into a career? Too bad I waited to contemplate that question until late in my final semester, but I’d been living in the moment, not in reality. The moment contained much drama and tumult, as the Viet Nam War raged and so did protests and marches. The working world seemed very far away.

I was unfamiliar with indecision. I’d always known what my next step would be. Now, I was about to step into the abyss. Why had no one warned me that I’d have some serious career decisions to make? Yikes!

That distress sent me into the college counseling center and across the desk from the man I can’t remember. I don’t recall what he looked like, but I do know that he spotted my counselor-like nature and sent me over to talk to his old pal, the head of the Department of Counselor Training. From there, I entered the program and walked out two years later with my Masters degree.
When I began, in addition to enormous relief at having direction again, I had lofty thoughts about reducing suffering in the world. If I could provide an authentic human connection with people who felt alone in their worst days, it would be worth doing. And I had some indication that I’d be good at it.

I’d had a rare glimpse of that possibility because the YMCAs I frequented in high school and college were piloting encounter groups, where a small group of strangers would come together, attend to the dynamics of the moment, and develop new skills to connect and become self-aware. The hope was that such groups would help with community building and personal growth, and ultimately societal change.

As I sat in my first groups as a fifteen year-old, I was a spectator. Too shy to speak up, I learned to listen and watch. Pretty soon I was able to take the emotional temperature of the room and of each participant. I could sense how the session was going, who was on the verge of an outburst, who was detached, who was suffering. I had no idea that I was in training for my eventual career.

After the first session, shamed that I had not spoken up, I struggled to come up with what I would have said if I had been able to. That question became my focus in each subsequent group. Once I finally became able to identify what I could have said, I began a long project to improve my timing and be able to come up with it and out with it in the moment. If one of the leaders’ goals was to help participants conquer their own limitations, they had a success story. I was still shy, but I was no longer tongue-tied.

I began to watch the leaders to attempt to figure out which one would say what next. I began to see the spaces where they could. When I stepped back, I could see the amazing fact that if you put strangers in a room with a common mission of communicating from the heart, differences went out the window and community happened.

I wanted more of that. I just hadn’t figured out where to get it until my encounter with the man in the counseling office. My friends were about to run off to teach math, help deliver babies, surf in the Pacific. I would learn how to save the world, one person at a time.

It wasn’t long until I learned I’d have to modify that goal – I would try to help one person at a time improve their functioning. It would be a matter of helping them find their own resilience, not saving anybody. I could only support and witness them as they overcame their suffering. I got adjusted to my limitations, and set aside the grand ambition.

Others didn’t stop so short. Beginning in the 1990s, I began to hear of medications that had the potential to eliminate traumatic memories entirely. And later, techniques that promised to allow the memory to persist but removed the crippling emotions that were attached to it. Now that so much more is understood about memory and how it is formed and stored, and about trauma and its effects, various points of intervention can be identified that weren’t available in the past.

For instance, I was taught in graduate school that once formed, memory was fixed. Now it is known that recalling a memory opens a door to modifying it, or even erasing it. According to the theory of reconsolidation, each time a memory is retrieved, it changes and becomes possible to alter.

I was also taught in grad school that the brain was fixed - it could deteriorate but not improve. Now it is known that brain plasticity allows it to regenerate, form new connections, and even become freed from its traumas.

As more wars have created more victims of PTSD, and their suffering has become well-known, the stakes for figuring out how to use these new understandings has gone up. If we ask our service members to kill and risk their own safety for our cause, while we sit in our living rooms watching sports, should we l least offer to remove the scars that remain?

Early on, scientists discovered that a beta-blocker medication called propranolol interfered with the initial storage of a traumatic memory. Later, it was found that the same medication may also be able to interfere when the memory is called up even years later. Studies continue with other medications that may be even more potent and have the potential to expunge toxic memories entirely, although they may take other nontoxic memories with them.

Another technique called EMDR, for eye movement desensitization and reprocessing, involves no medications, but eye movements guided by a therapist trained in the procedure. It is often successful in blunting the traumatic emotional content of a memory. Other similar noninvasive methods are also in use.

While these interventions are being further developed, several questions present themselves:

Who should receive these dramatic interventions, and when? For example, should a rape victim wait for an intervention until after the trial is over so that her testimony will include the expected display of emotion?

If we become able to erase the terrible events that happen to us from our memories, what does that do to our personhood?

And the ultimate ethical question, should we go ahead and implement every intervention that we become able to do? If not, what will hold us back?

Who will decide which of these measures is appropriate for which individuals? How bad does it have to be to justify the complete erasure of memory?

The man I can’t remember and I didn’t have to ponder such large questions. He went to work helping me find the answer to my question about what I want to be when I finally grow up. He asked me good questions: when I’d been the most energized, who I knew that I especially admired, what I thought I could be good at, what I would be proud to do. He didn’t try to erase my discomfort, but did put the right questions in my head, and it turned out I had the answers. Then he handed me some tools to act on those answers, and said goodbye. I sure hope I called back to thank him.
Future helpers will have a far larger arsenal of tools to work with than he did. They will regularly meet with people in far more distress than I, who may end up forgetting far more than their counselor’s name.

CBH – O4/12

THE LAST THING YOU WANT TO LEARN

2012-03-15T11:00:00.000-07:00

THEME: FOR THE SAKE OF THE CHILDREN

There can be no keener revelation of a society's soul than the way in which it treats its children. - Nelson Mandela

Once a year, a group of slow-moving people gathers in my driveway to accomplish a major feat – walking across the street. They have cancer and are in the active phase of treatment which may weaken them physically, but not in the ways that count. They head toward the Wellness House, a cancer support center that sits across from my house. Instead of staying home which they could easily justify, they come out to kick off the 5 and 10K walk that raises funds for the center. There are balloons, music and prizes. While the walkers set out, runners pace around trying to stay loose in the early morning air, dressed in team T-shirts with a loved one’s picture on the front, or a team slogan like Cancer is a word, not a sentence. MORE . . .

The whole event is bathed in grief. No one wants to be there, wearing a picture of a person they love. No one wants to watch someone find it hard to walk across the street. No one would wish this trouble on another.

But life being what it is, you don’t get what you want; you get what you get. And what you get gives you a chance to learn things you never wanted to learn. So the people show up, and what comes out is the resolve that rests underneath the grief.

Anytime of the week, I see folks walking through the doors across the street for a support group meeting, or lecture, or exercise class. Some of them have cancer; some of them love someone with cancer. I feel glad for them that they have this place to go. I feel sad remembering my friend and her family who had no such place to go when she faced cancer back in 1990, when her children were young teenagers.

The ones that hitch my heart the most are the children, hurrying in to join a bereavement support group. The arrival of grief into a child’s life introduces reality, roughly and suddenly. It begins with the illness: Instead of Grandpa being the guy you love to play with, he becomes a sick person you have to take it easy around. If Grandpa dies, the child begins a lengthy walk with grief, and the adults who remain must learn how to help.

Some of the basics of helping children to grieve are well-understood:

§ Let them see you cry, and tell them that it is normal. It gives them permission to express emotion when they need to. And it lets them know that they don’t need to hold theirs in to help you.

§ Communicate clear and realistic messages. “Grandma died.” “Her body stopped working.” “It cannot be fixed.”

§ Avoid confusing statements like “She’s gone away,” or “She’s sleeping,” or “She’s gone on a trip far away.” Children are concrete thinkers and will misunderstand those references and wait for their loved one to show up one day.

§ Watch how you portray God. Instead of implicating God in the disappearance of a loved one, as in “God needed her so he called her home,” promote him as a source of comfort and help, if you so believe.

§ Don’t be afraid to ask questions of your child, and encourage him to do the same. Find out what your child knows about death, and about the terms you are using to explain the death. Your conversations may need to be repeated again and again as your child grows in understanding. You may still be talking about this periodically for years, as kids need to reprocess their grief as they move through developmental stages.

Other realities about grieving children are less well-known:

§ Kids are masters of intermittent grieving. They may seem in the depths one minute, and then ready to dash out to play the next. It is as if they have a circuit breaker that saves them from overload. Be assured that this is normal. In fact, the rest of us might be smart to learn from them.

§ Kids often believe that they are responsible for the death of a loved one. Since they naturally believe that the universe revolves around them, they overestimate their power, and their responsibility. They can imagine that anything they did wrong could be the reason for a loved one’s death.

§ Grief is not one-size-fits-all. For children as well as adults, there are wide ranges of emotion, as well as different styles of grieving. Everyone has an individual grief footprint. Avoid imposing outside constructs like stages of grief or expectations about timing.

Expect siblings to grieve differently from each other, because they will. Make sure they know that and reassure them that as long as they do not stop themselves from grieving, they will be okay.

§ It is important to involve children in story-telling about the deceased, and in rituals of remembrance. But judge carefully how and when to carry this out. There is no rule about whether a child should attend a wake or funeral. That decision can even wait until the last minute, and the child should have a chance to weigh in.

Whether they attend or not, let other rituals emerge over time. A visit to Grandma’s favorite picnic spot, or cooking a meal made up of her favorite foods, or remembering her birthday by going through family pictures can all be healing. Children can suggest their own favorite ways of remembrance.

§ Finally, make sure they know that grief gets easier over time, even though it never fully goes away. Tell them that the power of good memories grows, and the intense longing lessens.

This year when the day for the walk arrives, I plan to concentrate on the children in their T-shirts, who are doing what they can, and their parents, who are showing them how.

CBH 03/12

SHE COULD HAVE HAD IT ALL

2012-02-29T13:49:00.001-08:00

THEME: TAKING A LEAP

All growth is a leap in the dark, a spontaneous unpremeditated act without benefit of experience. ~ Henry Miller

I get temporarily popular every time a celebrity overdoses, suicides, or runs into some sort of ditch. Given my therapy background, people want to hear my attempt to explain such behavior. With Whitney Houston’s death, the question seems to be a three-parter: Why couldn’t she 1) kick that Bobby Brown aside, 2) get clean and sober and stay that way, and 3) get back to singing like she was supposed to?

There is an angry question lurking just below: How could she have a gift like that voice and squander it?

As I sit here I contend with dueling earworms. With Whitney singing, “I will always love you…” and Adele belting, “We could have had it all…” it’s hard to think. But I’ll take a crack at it.

I will stipulate that the behavior of an addict is incomprehensible to the normal bystander. Broken promises, lies, financial ruin, lost jobs, fractured relationships, and all the rest render the addict irresponsible, weak, pathetic, and stupid in the eyes of others. Their behavior looks and feels intentional.

The people who care about them eventually need to take a step back to save their own sanity. Into that space, especially with celebrities, others who don’t actually care about them step in ready to take part. Plus, anyone in the vicinity who shares their affliction helps to keep it going. It is a powerful system bent on its own continuation, and might help explain Bobby Brown’s continued presence in Whitney’s life. Whoever sent him away from the memorial service at least made a point.

But how does the addiction take a death grip on an otherwise capable, even exceptional, person like Whitney?

I have a laundry list of explanations in my head, cobbled together from years of observing and theorizing. Pick your favorites.

*One theory says that all the addict wants to do is chase the exquisite pleasure of his or her first time. Maybe, research suggests, the pleasure that an addict gets from using his substance is on a whole different level than most people would experience. The problem is that the pleasure is never to be found again.

*Addicts describe their disordered thinking as if they are constantly spinning, which only allows them to encounter reality occasionally on a brief fly-by.

*Some describe finding that the first time they ever felt normal was during their first use. Later, many can feel normal only while under the influence. Worse, as they become physically addicted, to not use becomes painful due to withdrawal symptoms. It is no longer a matter of pleasure, but pain.

*Once life becomes too painful to face, drugs and alcohol provide escape. Pain can originate with losses, or failed expectations, or runaway expectations, or the depressive effects of the chemicals, or a hundred other sources. Once an addict finds his way to oblivion, it becomes a regular destination.

*Addiction is a disease that takes charge over the body, mind, and spirit. It makes the decisions, dictates the feelings, and drives the behavior. The individual is no longer a person with free will, but more like a host to an aggressive parasite.

*What goes on is an expression of cellular changes, the interaction between brain chemicals and receptors, that expresses itself in egregious behavior.

*Outside influences of people, places and things can start things up, keep the process going, or encourage relapse. Bobby Brown and the music industry come to mind.

*The individual hasn’t done enough “research” yet to become convinced that the problem is unmanageable and that therefore entering recovery is necessary. Denial slips into and out of place. The lucky ones hit bottom in time.

*Finally, it is indisputable that the addict misses a lot, being under the influence and possibly in a blackout for many crucial experiences. What they can’t remember is not part of their experience, and therefore does not motivate them toward change.

Those ideas and theories form a mudball of cause and effect. They may all be true, or not. They certainly make clear that there is no one simple answer.

If it’s hard for me to understand, it’s even more incomprehensible to the addict. And no one is more disappointed in the addict than he or she is. They wish for normalcy. But achieving it in the face of addiction is a big order. It requires large doses of knowledge, support, and hope. The longer the track record of failure, the less accessible those become.

Meanwhile, the addiction offers its own gifts: immediate pain relief, oblivion, escape. Whether the addiction seeks to chase the sublime or escape the intolerable, it’s an ironic struggle. While the body and mind duke it out in a private battle, it cannot be won without outside help, practical or spiritual, or both. How to make that happen remains a mystery for many.

Maybe we should confine ourselves to other question: Do we have gifts we are squandering? At least we can do something about that.

CBH 02/11

MY BRAIN ON FREDDIE MERCURY

2012-01-15T18:12:00.000-08:00

THEME: GOOD INTENTIONS
I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I intended to be. ~ Douglas Adams

Sometimes I wake up with a song in my head. Often the tune quickly dissipates, like the last wisps of a dream I can’t hold onto, fleeting and forgotten. I may recognize it as part of a commercial jingle (“1-800-588-2300 Empire”) that I hear all the time, or a line from a familiar song (like “This Land is Your Land” which I heard the other day). Its unimportance helps it go away.

But other times, the song stays with me all day long and into the next. My blood seems to pulse to its rhythm, and the words run like a news crawler in my brain, no matter what else I’m doing. When it finally lets up a couple of days later, it’s a relief.

Usually I know exactly where it came from, and that it’s my own fault. It follows a binge of sorts, like when I play the Leonard Cohen Live In London concert album intending to hear “That’s How the Light Gets In” just once, you know, to check on the lyrics and remember exactly how he said it (“Everything has a crack in it/That’s how the light gets in,” that perfect line). My good intentions are then overrun by a need to hear the whole thing, and try to place myself back into the concert I heard at the Chicago Theater a couple of years ago, a better-than-church transcendent night.

And then I play it again, and a few more times over the day, until I have worn a groove into my brain that sleep won’t erase.

But it isn’t just Leonard. My periodic visits to You Tube to see Freddie Mercury and Queen’s Live Aid set, which pundits call “the greatest live performance of all time,” set me off too. Just this fall, I commemorated the 20th anniversary of Freddie’s death by viewing the entire Live Aid performance, let’s just say, more than once.

But then I woke up to an exhausting, sweaty full-tilt version of “Radio Ga Ga” first thing in the day. I’d prefer to listen to Freddie when I invite him, not when he just decides to show up. I guess the truth is that since I invited him in the first place, it’s just that he never left. All right, more truth. It appears I can’t stop my binges once I start. Like all addicts, I believe I can control my conduct, but also like all addicts, I can’t control the consequences.

But it’s not all disturbing. Today I woke up to Temple Grandin, the autistic brilliant animal scientist portrayed by Claire Danes in the movie of the same name, belting out “You’ll Never Walk Alone” during the scene of her college graduation speech. A few days before, it was the Beach Boys’ “Good Vibrations,” which transported me back to my college dorm room when everything was ahead of me.

My friend Lorraine helped direct my attention to all of this. She seems to have a related and more mysterious version of this song phenomenon. She wakes up every day with a different song in her head, but not one she can pinpoint a connection to. The day we had lunch, she reported that Leon Russell’s “Delta Lady” showed up, not that she can remember hearing or particularly liking it. Her preferred playlist –Beatles, Eric Clapton – never appears and she wonders why. She is on the case, and has learned that this condition has a name, involuntary musical imagery, sometimes called musical imagery repetition or MIR.

Well-known prestigious scientific journal Wikipedia reports research showing that 98% of individuals experience this phenomenon, which it prefers to call earworm. Apparently women find that it lasts longer for them, and are more irritated by it than men.

Clearly, I have a touch of that too. I don’t know where “Good Vibrations” came from for instance, except that I must have a vault in my brain where all rock and roll tunes and lyrics from the sixties and seventies are stored.

I realize now that I was warned of trouble of this sort early in life by one of my favorite childhood stories. Robert McCloskey, the Make Way for Ducklings guy, wrote two Homer Price books, a series of stories about small-town boy Homer and a peculiar bunch of friends and relatives. In one, his Uncle Ulysses installed a shiny new jukebox with changing-color lights that cast a mesmerizing glow on his “up and coming” lunch counter. A mysterious stranger came in, installed a new song on the jukebox, and disappeared. Customers were entranced by the song, but then could not get it out of their heads, no matter what they did. Worse than that, they could not stop singing it. Soon, the entire town was afflicted. (Lyrics: “In a whole doughnut/There’s a nice whole hole/When you take a big bite/Hold the whole hole tight…”) The ultimate solution (spoiler alert) was to go to the library and consult the wisdom of Mark Twain. Why Twain? Because in an essay, he had posed the dilemma of getting something stuck in your head and not being able to shake it. Lorraine and I and Wikipedia are not the only ones to ponder this.

I’m sorry to include this last issue, in case it brings to life some buried demons, but Homer got me thinking about the songs that I take pains to avoid completely, lest they re-infest my brain. First, and worst, Disney’s “It’s a Small Small World” (“It’s small world after all/It’s a small world after all/It’s a small world after all…” until you want to scream). Then there’s Debby Boone’s “You Light Up My Life” (“to give me hope to carry on/You light up my days and fill my nights with song” – that’s for sure). And, affection for Julie Andrews aside, there’s “Do Re Mi” (“Doe a deer, a female deer/Ray a drop of golden sun…”) ad infinitum. Maybe there are bad song receptors in the brain that bind with such “doggerel” (Twain’s word) and won’t be extinguished.

In fact, maybe that’s the message. While I go around thinking I’m in charge around here, my brain is doing plenty on its own. It plays the songs it wants to hear, thinks the thoughts it wants to think, and lays down its own pathways, at least until I catch on and try to get it in line. Until then, I guess I have a soundtrack all my own, even if I’m not the one holding the baton.

CBH - 01/12

WRITING YOUR WAY HOME

2011-12-15T13:45:00.000-08:00

THEME: HOME
I long, as does every human being, to be at home wherever I find myself. ~ Maya Angelou

By day, it was a typical conference room with moveable tables and stackable chairs. By night, or at least this night, it became a salon, a home away from home. The tables made a cozy U-shape, so everyone could see and be seen. Table cloths covered each, and antique-style lamps shed soft light. Plates of sweets and coffee took up the table near the door. Wordless music played quietly in the background. The words would come from the dozen women who filed in, late because there was childcare trouble – too many kids with too many needs, more than had been expected. The chaos of resistance and misplaced toys and unfamiliar places took its usual toll on both mothers and kids. New childcare recruits were summoned to help, and we could begin.

These women looked tired. They had all experienced domestic violence and were finding their way out, either through shelter or education and counseling or groups for moms and kids. They had children to care for, jobs to find, homes to make. Homes that would be safe.

Each one seemed to exhale as she entered the room and looked around. Some wandered to the other end of the room to see the art exhibit that had been produced a couple of years before by another group of women, and their children. Others went straight for the tables and a few minutes of solitude. A frisson of anxiety hung in the air. Each had volunteered to be here, and we, the organizers, had implied certain promises: Come, write, tell your story. It will do you some good; and if you choose to share, what you write will help others understand.

Karen called us to order, offering words of welcome and assurances of confidentiality. She introduced John the facilitator, a writer himself and teacher of writing. He first went around the circle and asked each woman to share her past experiences with writing, which varied from lifelong journaling, to nothing since middle school, to college creative writing classes, to songwriting. He listened, asked questions, used their names. His message: No matter what you have or haven’t done about it lately, you are a writer who deserves a place at the table.

Meanwhile, the rest of us organizers sat in an outside circle, checking our watches and tapping our feet. We started late, Childcare ends at nine, Let’s get them started our brains chattered. It turned out that John was getting them started.

He played a video that his high school students had prepared for the occasion. A succession of students read poems they had written in his class. Each line began with “I remember…” (a prompt that was originated by artist and writer Joe Brainard in 1975 and is often used in writing circles.) Some of the poems were lighthearted, some painful to hear. The students modeled honesty and courage. Meanwhile, through his conversation, John was busy establishing himself as a safe and peaceful man who had respect and appreciation for his wife. More exhaling.

We’d given each of them a nice journal, but when it was time to write, most requested the copy paper we had stacked in the corner. More space? Easier to crumple and discard? Anyway, they wrote in silence, right away, I remember…. The music clicked off in the middle. No one noticed.

John called time about 25 minutes in.

“Now, who would like to share?” he asked.

There was an immediate volunteer who read her recollections of childhood summertime, her grandmother, and fireflies. Another followed with remembrances of high school, another on the births of her children. The reminder was clear – these women were far more than domestic violence survivors. They had lives beyond trauma.

As each read, the rest listened intently. They laughed together. As each finished, she received a thank you from John. As time passed, the volunteers came more slowly. The tone changed. Imbedded between the fond memories started to appear darker and deeper things. The poems began to speak of red and swollen eyes, and wishing to turn back time, and feeling like an outsider even at home. Vivid details appeared, the kind that people focus on to escape the intolerable, a red flower pot, rainbows of light on the rug.

The room transformed again, from writing salon to sacred space, where the truth could be told in safety.

When John brought the evening to a close we asked everyone to evaluate the experience to guide us for the future. They wanted more writing, more participants, more chances. They wanted us to share the project with colleges, museums, radio audiences, Facebook, schools, libraries, and online.

We asked everyone who would be willing to share her words to let us make a copy to keep. Some did, others almost did but held back at the end. Some wanted to expand their piece and turn it in later. Now a box sits in the office labeled Our Story Project, locked for privacy but open for submissions anytime day or night.

They left to pick up their children with goodbyes and thanks. The organizers stayed to deconstruct the salon and turn it back into a meeting room so it could host a breakfast for donors in the morning. We didn’t need to deconstruct the evening. It was a success and there would be more.

We were just about done with the cleanup – the leftover cookies were packed for the next day, the lamps and cloths and power strips set aside for pickup by the volunteers who had supplied them, and the tables were rearranged into a breakfast-friendly layout.

One of the organizers came back in with a message from the child care staff.

“I don’t know what you did to those women in there,” she’d said, “but do more of it. They were completely different people when they came back to get the kids. They were smiling and calm. It was like they’d all had massages.”

Another transformation. We had invented the first writing spa. Come. Make yourself at home. Think of only yourself for a couple of hours. Express yourself. Find out you are not alone. Be heard.

I’ll let you know when and where you can read their words.

CBH - 12/11

WHAT PHOTOGRAPHS CAN DO

2011-11-15T13:41:00.000-08:00

THEME: REMEMBRANCE
She glances at the photo, and the pilot light of memory flickers in her eyes. ~ Frank Deford

My father is 14 or 15 in the photo, posing with the big band he helped organize in high school. He wears two-tone saddle shoes, neatly tied. They look new. The photo has been hanging on my family picture wall for 15 years waiting for me to really look at it. I finally did.

In any old picture, the first thing I notice is the shoes. They hint at normal life, intimate suggestions of routine and circumstance. As I study his picture, I imagine him tying them on that morning, and wonder what was going on in those minutes: was he bickering with his sisters; what breakfast smells wafted upstairs; what was on his mind?

His eager and confident face hitches my heart. He has no idea that he is almost halfway through his life already, or that he will find a great love and have a child. Or that he will die suddenly and not be able to finish what he started.

It was around 1930 then. The Depression was two years old. Across the world in Germany, where his family originally came from, Adolf Hitler was winding up ten years of speech-making, positioning himself to head the Nazi party. My father doesn’t know about that either, sitting there holding his saxophone.

*****

I climbed down off the bus into a busy parking lot lined with busses. Leaves crunched underfoot. It was a cloudy October day toward the end of our tour of Central and Eastern Europe. We waited behind a group of children chattering as they trailed their teachers though the gate. They quieted as they put on the hearing devices their docent handed out, and filed out the back door, leaving room for us. Auschwitz was a busy place.

Our docent was Magda, a compact blonde woman with a lined face and matter-of-fact manner. She must have been a child in the era she would tell us about, if she’d been born at all. She led us under a gate with a sign proclaiming, “Arbeit macht frei,” which translates “Work sets you free” or “Work brings freedom.” This cruel and ironic legend was used at the entrances of all the Nazi camps except one. It seemed to promise the Poles, Jews, gypsies, handicapped and others who the Nazis determined to eliminate that there would be a way out.

*****

The next picture on my wall shows some of my husband’s ancestors, captured in a formal family tableau, wife seated, husband beside her, adult children and their offspring lined up stiffly on either side.

The seated woman is Seraphina Studer Ruder, whom my daughter discovered when she did a family history project in middle school. Next to her is Fridolin, her husband. The names that bring smiles to our lips didn’t seem to cheer them up any. They both look pretty grim.

They’d left Germany in 1855, missing Hitler by 34 years, to settle in a German Catholic enclave in the middle of Illinois, and set themselves to farming. They posed for this picture about the time Hitler was denied entrance into art school in Vienna, for the third time. Had they stayed, would their children and grandchildren have been drawn into Hitler’s plans? If he’d been accepted into art school, would there have been any plans?

Hints about their lives jump at me. Their chairs rest on a rumpled shag rug. Her shoes, partly hidden by the nap, are petite and worn. His are dress shoes, well-used and scuffed. That morning for the picture, I imagine they put on the best they had, knowing they were laying down a record for those of us who would follow. It must have been a hard life with little leisure, in flat farmland that must have compared poorly to the hills and mountains of their youth.

*****

Magda led us to a long row of tidy red brick barracks, with a guard tower at the end of the road. Barbed wire ringed the area. She explained that the barracks had been built several years before the war for the Polish military, but turned out to be tailor-made for the Nazis’ purposes. Some buildings housed small numbers of SS troops, others crammed in hundreds of prisoners. We entered the first building, noting the terrazzo steps worn down in the middle by thousands of feet.

Large black and white photos hung on the walls, illustrating Magda’s talk. They captured the arrival of families, who stood together in ragged lines, children clinging to their parents’ knees. Their clothes are mussed, their shoes dusty, their faces grimy. None of them knows what is ahead, that soon they would be separated, men from women, children from mothers. Their faces are stunned and unknowing; exhausted people who couldn’t imagine the unimaginable.

We are told that the photos were taken in secret by two SS officers. Their motivation is unknown. I prefer to think that they were moved to preserve proof of what they couldn’t stop. Their action allows the 1.3 million people who visit each year to better take in what happened here. Without the photos, it would be impossible to believe.

We climbed the steps to the second floor of the barracks. Magda explained how prisoners were herded from here to the basement and told that finally they would have a shower. They were told to leave their suitcases and remove their glasses, clothing, and shoes to retrieve after they’d bathed.

Once the “shower room” door was locked, primitive gas canisters were dropped through chutes in the ceiling and minutes later, all were dead. Their bodies were transported to the end of the row of barracks to the new crematorium, by Jewish prisoners who were spared in order to carry out this duty. Back in the barracks, belongings were gathered up and stockpiled.

She led us to a series of large rooms. Lights were low. On each side was a huge glassed-in case, floor to ceiling. The first was filled with suitcases carefully labeled with name and address as if they would be needed again. Thousands of wire-rimmed glasses filled another.

Behind the glass in the next room sat an enormous pile of shoes, everyday necessities turned into horrific trophies. No one spoke in the room.

We came next to the children’s window that held toys and baby blankets, and a mountain of kids’ shoes, turned every which way as if scattered at the front door after school. To look at one pair was to imagine its owner, so we looked away. We filed by, eyes brimming.

The last pictures were of the liberation of Auschwitz in March 1945. Many Nazis had fled by then, marching hundreds of prisoners into the countryside. Soviet liberators ushered emaciated survivors in striped uniforms down the path we had just walked on. Some prisoners looked directly at the camera. Had they dared to expect this?

*****

On my wall, the post-war pictures begin. In a four-generation snapshot, my toddler husband sits on the lap of Fridolin and Seraphina’s son, his Buster Browns dangling. Parallel pictures from our two families stand side by side, showing two ex-soldiers, glad to be back to normal life, neither knowing what is to come.

My husbands’ parents laugh, barefoot at a well pump, holding him high. Sixty-some years later, they still laugh together. Mine lean into each other, dressed for a night on the town. My mom wears a sophisticated career girl ensemble and high heels, my dad a business suit, all shine and polish. I would be along in a year or two, and he would be gone a couple of years after that.

Whether caught up in waves of history, or in private tragedies, it is just as well that we can’t tell what is coming. But it is a gift when we have pictures to hold the moments still where we can visit them, for remembering or trying to understand.

CBH 11/11

A Happy Story about Borders?

2011-10-15T13:34:00.000-07:00

THEME: WHAT A CHARACTER
Who you are speaks so loudly I can’t hear what you’re saying. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

It seemed like a nightmare. Borders on Michigan Avenue was closing? Where would I go to have a tea and look down on the Water Tower park at throngs of shoppers? What would I do when I could no longer browse the crazy assortment of off-brand books in the basement, or look through the ironic Christmas cards on sale in January, looking for the perfect ones for next year? Where would I find another store with such character? If this iconic location could fail, what did that portend?

Soon there was an announcement. False alarm. It wouldn’t close after all. Phew! That was close. But the fear had been planted.

Months later, the worst came true. They would all close, even the suburban one I had been going to since my kids were small and I was brand new to the area.

I visited the wake for my dying Borders three times. The first time, facing only 20% reductions and abundant piles of gift items I couldn’t relate to, I tried but couldn’t find a fitting remembrance.

The second time, I bought a travel book for an upcoming trip to Europe and was out the door without even trying to find the perfect goodbye. A prickle of guilt followed me. As book prices climbed in recent years, even though Borders remained my psychological home, in reality I had often defected to the local used book store, and of course, amazon.com where I could buy new or used whenever I had the whim.

The third time, the discounts were up to 60 to 80%. The pile of unrelated-to-reading items had grown. The lap robes, tote bags and stuffed animals posed the question: Did the store go down the tubes because they lost focus and invested in items that no one would buy? Or because of defection by people like me? Or was it that they didn’t jump on the e-book bandwagon fast enough? Or all of them?

In the Psychology and Self Help sections I found some gems – Altered Egos, The Brain that Changes Itself, The Power of Story. Finally, something worthy to remember Borders by.

The checkout clerk was unreasonably cheerful – she was losing her job and I was the one who was sad?

On my way out, I passed a large sign, a letter from the store manager. She thanked customers for 20 years of loyalty, and reviewed some of the good times we’d had over the years. She apologized to the author scheduled for a book signing in October after the store would be closed. She asked customers not to worry about the employees, who were stocked with happy memories and would surely land on their feet.

Below the sign sat a stack of cards. “Please leave us a message. What did this store mean to you?”

I scribbled something about my kids growing up there, and me too. And good luck. And I’d miss them. And I was sad.

As I drove away. I wondered how the supposedly evil big conglomerate that was going to mean the death of the small independent book store – remember the plot of You’ve Got Mail? – morphed into a refuge, with cozy reading corners and coffee, not to mention play space for kids, that felt like home?

I talked with friends from other places who’d said their own goodbyes to Borders with similar regret. Until I talked to my friends Linda and Van. Every Sunday they have a ritual – they trek to the Borders in the Quad Cities, listen to music, enjoy their coffee, browse newspapers, pick up a book or two, rain or shine.

They figured their fate would be the same as the rest of us, until their creative store manager Kit Whan heard about Books-A-Million, the third largest bookselling chain, expressing an interest in acquiring some Borders sites. She decided it should be hers and started a campaign. 29,000 letters and emails later, Books-A-Million brass stopped in to see what all the fuss was about. They signed on and offered employment to any interested Borders employees.

So they will live happily ever after, with any luck, although I am sure there will be a certain adjustment period. Instead of a nightmare for them, it became a dream; as if the lover who just spurned you fixes you up with a new guy, not as handsome or familiar, but definitely promising. I hope it works out.

A happy postscript: Books-A-Million is taking over 13 other Borders locations, bringing happiness to other lucky duck communities. The rest of us will just have to grieve for a while. Then we’ll have a big decision to make: are we going to take up with that Barnes and Noble guy, the buttoned-up corporate one who lacks the warmth and personality we’re used to, the guy we wouldn’t give a glance to before? A tough decision that.
CBH - 10/11

MY DREAM, MY BOOK

2011-09-15T13:33:00.000-07:00

THEME: DREAM ON

Dreams are illustrations. . .from the book your soul is writing about you. ~ Marsha Norman

Here was my dream. I would write a book that would change the world. It would be about personal narrative, the story that each of us tells about our own life. For a while there, the working title was If Your Life Was a Movie, Would You Go to See It?

“No, too trivial,” said the writing teacher. “This is an important topic.”

Second working title: What’s Your Story? How the Story You Tell about Yourself Makes All the Difference.

“No,” said the writing teacher, “Wordy and repetitive.”

Time for a new writing teacher.

Back to my dream: the book would trace the various inborn traits and early experiences that we use to invent our sense of self and the story that comes out of it. Everyone who read it would create a coherent version of their life story. They would make connections between where they came from, what experiences life threw at them and how they survived, or didn’t. It would be a selfhelp book that actually helped.

The book would be the capstone of my therapy career. For all those years I sat in a chair in a room, helping my clients wrestle meaning out of the crises of their lives. I had to have learned something and this was the way to offer it to a much wider audience than the one at a time one I was used to.

The point is not mere navel-gazing. Once you know your story you can change it, which is what therapy is all about. Researcher James Pennebaker has demonstrated that writing about trauma bolsters both physical and mental well-being. So I asked my clients to journal in between sessions. I would sometimes receive a thoughtful and cogent account of how the current stresses fit in with the flow of life.

More often I would get pages that rambled through raw emotion, blame, self-help slogans, and self-recrimination. I’d hand it back and ask for a second step: highlight the 5 most important sentences, bracket any wild and irrational statements so we could set them aside, and start to figure out what this episode means in your life. Then we would work on answering some questions: Does this remind you of anything? On your best day, how would you prefer to handle this? What stops you from doing that? Whose voice do you hear in your head giving you counsel, and is that voice to be trusted?

It was to be a simple book, a tool for the reader to use on his or her own messy life, kind of a California Closets for the mind and heart. Surely people would jump at the chance to sort through their own life stories and put them in order.

But then my own messy life intervened and I never finished writing the thing, though I do have three successive richly imagined formats filed in a drawer where they can help no one. They heckle me from there, shouting muffled accusations of “slacker!” If they were in charge, they’d give me an Incomplete on my career, and one more term to finish what I started.

Maybe I need to open that drawer. I think in the absence of my approach the world has gone a bit mad. We now have a spew of completely unprocessed minutiae spraying at us every time we turn on the computer or the smart phone or the iPad. The me, me, and more me enthusiasts inflict their me-ness on each other and all bystanders on a daily (or minutely) basis through Facebook, (which knows more about you and your buying habits than you do), Foursquare (which lets you log every single place you went today), and Farmville (that reveals that people you previously thought well of are living pretend lives as farmers instead of reading serious biographies or playing tennis like you thought they were).

Is no one interested in stopping for a moment to tease out meaning from all that? Anyone?

Apparently Facebook is. Their new Timeline approach builds a history of what you have ever posted and what can be learned from any of the 7 million sites and the apps you use. It’s certainly nice that they care, but all that data isn’t going to help you when it comes to deciding how to make the best life. Like those undigested journal pages, it just churns out an overwhelming volume of raw data, all equally important.

There is a reason why you have a prefrontal cortex and Facebook doesn’t. Your cortex allows you to prioritize, weigh in your values, perfect your unique vision, and stake out your little patch of territory that no one else can stand on. It helps you recognize you.

If I got serious and started up again today on the book, I figure I could finish in nine months or so, you know, like gestating a baby without the morning sickness.

Just think, I could advertise my new baby on Facebook, and if only a fraction of the 800 million Facebook members gave it a try, I would be in the pink, speaking to an audience far bigger than I could dream. Now that I think of it, there would be something bewitchingly subversive about using their methods to meet my goals.

Stand back. I’m going to open the drawer and see what flies out. Just send in my meals. I’ll be busy making my dream come true. It’s who I am.

CBH - 09/11

MY THREE DAYS AS A CUBAN

2011-08-15T13:41:00.000-07:00

THEME: HEAR NO, SEE NO, SPEAK NO, YOU KNOW
"Shall I tell you what the real evil is? To cringe to the things that are called evils, to surrender to them our freedom, in defiance of which we ought to face any suffering." ~ Lucius Annaeus Seneca

The email fairly screamed: Please take it down. You could be placing people at risk. Give us time to look at it first.

Uh oh. All I’d done is set up an online chronicle of my trip to Cuba.* I had to do something with the barrage of images and stories that woke me up every morning, to the Afro-Cuban beat of the music that followed us everywhere and then followed me home.

As a courtesy, or maybe nagged by a vestige of the paranoia that hovers in the Cuban air, the first thing I did was send the link to my two tour leaders. And received this alarming reply.

I had plenty of stories to tell. We arrived the day after the 50^th anniversary of the Revolution. Banners with Fidel’s likeness proclaimed its success. Our bus ride through Havana suggested otherwise. Dilapidated buildings, streams of vintage U.S. cars, and stacks of post-Revolution fortress-like apartment buildings lined our path to the Parque Central Hotel. We passed Revolution Square where officials once corralled tens of thousands of Cubans, some accounts say upwards of a million, to stand in the Caribbean sun to hear El Lider’s six-hour speeches.

It sat empty today, a vast parking lot of a space. A tower, 358 feet of revolutionary fervor, rose in the center. A tan office building that bordered the space on the right was decorated with a five story high metal sculpture of Che Guevara’s head. It seemed a high honor for an itinerant revolutionary who left Cuba after only six years for greener pastures in Bolivia, where he was executed after that revolution failed. Still, his image is everywhere.

We checked into our hotel, a replica of an older European hotel, with mahogany furniture and heavy draperies. We drew them open and gasped. We call it a slum; they call it normal. Welcome to Cuba, the land of the-emperor-has-no-clothes.

Before our departure from Miami, our tour leaders had given us just two pieces of advice:

1) Do not use the word “humanitarian” in front of the Cuban airport officials. They officially don’t need any help, and it might complicate our entry into the country to suggest that they do.

2) Watch the tour bus driver. Even though he claims to speak no English, he could easily be fluent and spying on our official tour guide Celia, an engaging single mom. If so, he would be ready to turn her in if she spouted any anti-regime opinions.

Other than that, they were circumspect. Listen, they told us, talk to Cubans, observe, explore, and draw our own conclusions. At the end of the trip, they would be curious to hear our impressions.

I closed the email and reached for the phone. My tech person took down the site, and I waited for the verdict. In the few hours the site was up, who might have read it? Travelers and ordinary Cubans did not have access to the Internet, but such a state must have people monitoring chatter like mine. I worried. I couldn’t sleep. What if something I said was turned against Celia? I felt watched. And controlled. And afraid. I comforted myself that I had taken care to change her name, and never identified the tour or leaders. Could they track them down anyway? What had I done?

My worry took me back to what I’d learned about Fidel and his death grip on the country. He started out with the pure-sounding intention to overthrow the cruel and corrupt dictator Batista in order to create a fair society after centuries of exploitive rule. Once in power though, he leaped in another direction and announced that he was a Marxist. He took over private property and threw out foreign businesses. Affluent Cubans couldn’t get out of there fast enough. Cuba became the place where everybody gets the same and nobody gets much.

To convince the rest of the populace to go along with the plan, he instituted public executions by firing squad, on TV for easy viewing, of people who disagreed. Here was a new incarnation of the powerful and bloody oppression they were used to, only this time it was of their own. Which brought me to my central – and very American - question: how could this last after 50 years of disappointment? Where was the protest?

The answer was in the brilliance of that death grip. Each block has an official to monitor the compliance of the citizens. Children earn kerchiefs for learning devotion to the State, which helps get them into the best schools. The best jobs – like those in the tourist industry – go to favored loyalists. The lively black market is a back door operation that most participate in, but does not openly challenge the status quo. The whole structure of Cuban society was tilted, so that the balance of power stayed unbalanced.

Finally, I got the call. Both of them were on the line. They liked the site. They were glad the trip made such an impression. They’d never had anyone go to such lengths to document a trip. And they were grateful for my willingness to alter it if need be.

Their greatest concern, they explained, was for Celia. If one of her tourists left with a poor impression of Cuba, she would be blamed. I removed a few details, renamed a few other characters we’d met to make her more difficult to identify. The site went back up, and I exhaled, free again from censorship and worry.

This final episode of my Cuba experience ended with a three-day taste of life as Cubans live it every day. Now I watch with interest through the eyes of Cuban bloggers, and news reports of recent reforms. Cubans can now have some types of small businesses, a million people are being removed from the State’s payroll. Cubans are promised the opportunity to travel. For our part, American travel restrictions are lifting, with brand new licenses being granted to tour companies for more than just humanitarian trips.

It is change in its infancy, but maybe this time real change can come without a revolution and all its promises, but with gradual evolution of freedoms that allow more for more, instead of less for everyone. And eventually, the freedom to say what you see.

*www.cubacurious.com

CBH – 08/11

POSITIVE PSYCHOLOGY AND ME

2011-07-28T13:37:00.000-07:00

THEME: WELL, DUH
To spell out the obvious is often to call it in question. ~Eric Hoffer

I rented the office, then scoured used furniture stores and garage sales to furnish and decorate it. I even splurged on a painting of a rainy Paris street from TJ Maxx. I was ready. I was in private practice.

My very first client showed up on a Tuesday. I handed him the client questionnaire I had crafted, on a tasteful Lucite clip board. After the demographic info, I hit him with the big question: What do you hope to gain from counseling? I left three lines for the reply, but he only needed one.

He wrote: Peace of mind, and introduced me to the answer I would see far more than any other in the next 20-plus years of my practice. It wasn’t happiness, or get my spouse off my back, or make my depression go away. It was a much bigger order, peace of mind.

At the same time, at the University of Pennsylvania, a rising star named Martin Seligman, Ph.D., who would become the guru of Positive Psychology later on, was setting up shop too. A research psychologist, he began seeing what he could learn from rats. He tells it all in his new book Flourish (2011).

You don’t get to be guru of anything without an outsized ego, and Seligman doesn’t try to hide his. He details his turning points from rat researcher to human researcher, and later from pathology-seeker to happiness-promoter.

In a rare burst of humility, he acknowledges that his earlier concentration on happiness research (reported in Authentic Happiness, 2004) was lightweight and misguided. In this new book, he sees the light – he has decided to move far beyond mere happiness.

In describing how he came to this recent turning point, he criticizes two common approaches used by his colleagues in the real world of therapy and life change: psychotropic medication and talk therapy. Why? Because, he says, they only target symptom relief, and then the effect wears off. If that was the case, I wasted my time with that questionnaire and the considerable work that followed. But I have a question. What became of the research (not his) that shows that both approaches are effective for many people, giving the long-term edge to talk therapy?

While he made friends with his rats, I dug in at my office, pursuing one of those useless pursuits, trying to help my real clients find their peace of mind. We explored all the areas of life that I asked about in my questionnaire: their health, upbringing, daily stressors, family issues, spirituality, and others. We tried to bring all that together, locate their obstacles and strengths, and weave it together into a new life story. Quite often we succeeded.

Seligman tested me with this book. For instance, he and his editors might reconsider the section on his stint as a residence hall-based professor who found his students’ needs – over such matters as date rapes and suicide attempts – to be intolerable “hassles” for him. Don’t we want our gurus to be a bit more compassionate than that?

I also stuck with him through his reports of his grouchy, snarky, resistant, sometimes brittle and resentful behavior, even though we might hope for more positivity from our positivity gurus.

I was not an early adopter of Positive Psychology. I was exposed to an earlier generation of it when I worked in a project to provide job readiness training and support to “displaced homemakers.” I was committed to help these abandoned women step outside the narrow “housewife” role into career paths that would build their independence. It became clear early on that the director of the program and I differed on how to accomplish that.

She had run the first round of the six-week program before I came on board, and I was to follow her protocol. At the first session, each participant was to choose an adjective to serve as her nickname in class. It seemed lame but I led the group through the exercise. The first client chose “Hard-working.” The next, “Feisty.” “Hopeful,” the next.

Wait a minute, I thought. I’d already worked in community mental health for several years and had known numerous women in this circumstance. Where was “Pissed off,” or “Depressed” or “Scared to death,” or “Exhausted”?

The answer was right before me. The clients had heard the line in the directions that I had missed even as I read it to them.

“Be sure you pick a positive word.” Oh. They were so compliant that they were willing to pretend positiveness.

Finally though, one of them came through.

“Hostile,” she said. The other members looked at me in alarm. She’d broken a rule.

“Okay,” I said, “Hostile it is. By the end of the class, let’s see if we can move that to – what would you like?”

“Able to sleep,” she said.

“Good then,” I said, “That’s a deal.”

I was called on the carpet as soon as the women were out the door.

“You allowed one of them to describe herself in a negative way,” said the director.

“But it reflects where she is,” I countered.

“We have to model positivity,” she said.

“But that would be false,” I said. I caught the this-is-only-going-to-get-worse look in her eye.

“You’ll have to help her choose a new word tomorrow,” she declared.

“Are you sure we don’t want to meet them where they really are?” I asked, pushing beyond the intelligent stopping point.

She was sure. The next day we settled on something like “Determined.” By the end of it, she was sleeping better, but she and I both knew it would have been better to get there the honest way.

I was similarly unimpressed with the next waves of positiveness that washed through the therapy world: affirmations, self-esteem-building, and Seligman’s pursuit of happiness. I figured from the start of my career that the only realistic goal would include a balance between happiness and sorrow, and the resources to survive both. I just kept pursuing that peace of mind I’d been hearing about from my clients. I felt sure that concentrating only on happiness would deny the part of life that has the most to teach us.

As is often the case, science eventually catches up and proves what we already know. Now in Seligman’s new frontier he’s decided to shoot for well-being instead of happiness. He says that it rests on positive emotions (including happiness), as long as other factors are present, things like engagement, relationship, meaning, and accomplishment. Sounds a little familiar to me – an ambitious goal beyond symptom relief, created by weaving together a variety of elements. Well, duh, Doc, if only we’d been able to have this conversation years ago, maybe I could have been your guru.

In the end, I have to hand it to him. He’s gone far beyond the scope of what I accomplished at my little office. He’s now helping institute his principles in schools here and in Australia, and more recently in the Army to address the needs of returning war vets. And he has maneuvered his new passion for building resilience over treating pathology to the center of his profession.

When I got to the end of the book, my doubts evaporated. This touchy, self-aggrandizing researcher talks not about the pathology of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, but about the strength and wisdom that comes from Post-Traumatic Growth.

So we agree. For the best life, go ahead and assemble those positive emotions all you want, but add engagement, throw in some relationships and accomplishments, and wrap it up with meaning. When things really go wrong and life gets as bad as it can, look for strengths to emerge. Yes. After all our problems, Dr. Seligman and I have ended up on the same team.

CBH 07/15

GYM SHOES SPEAK

2011-06-08T19:58:00.000-07:00

THEME: SAYING TOO MUCH
If you wouldn't write it and sign it, don't say it.
~Earl Wilson

My friend Carol and I walked home from school down 111^th Street. We made it almost to the bus stop a block from my place. It was a Friday because I carried my white Keds home for their bi-weekly cleaning, as required by the gym teacher. My name was neatly printed along the side, and I had them tied together by the laces because they looker cooler that way.

I know I was in fifth grade because I remember the cocktail of growing freedom that fall – I could take unapproved routes home, pick up candy at the school store with my babysitting money, climb on the giant boulders where the vicious dog lived – without anyone telling me I was too little. Life was already good, and getting better.

As usual, Carol was preoccupied with the fact that she was adopted. She was bewilderingly resentful of the gentle older couple who revolved around her wonderingly. My favorite thing at her house was the Christmas table display that included a mirror posing as an ice skating pond, complete with motorized skaters. I could watch it for hours. This girl had no reason to complain. Her kind dad even made overtures to me, offering a little fathering.

For my part, I was preoccupied with the fact that I was fatherless. If I couldn’t have my own father, I certainly wouldn’t consider siphoning off someone else’s, so I declined his offer, politely.

As Carol and I walked along kicking acorns and rehashing the day, the subject of my father’s absence, something I rarely discussed, came up. He died before I could remember in a plane crash, blameless in my view, and permanently heartbroken that he couldn’t see me grow up.

Carol wanted to explain something to me that she’d been thinking about ever since Sunday school the week before.

“Your father,” she opined, “must have done something really bad.”

I stopped. Nobody had ever said anything bad about my father.

“Because God had to punish him by making him die,” she explained.

I sputtered in outrage. Words fled. How could mere words ever bridge the gulf that opened between us, anyway?

She stopped too, waiting for my reply, wise in her own mind, satisfied that she had enlightened me.

I let my gym shoes speak for me. I took aim at her smug certainty. The right one connected with her cheek, bounced off , and headed for the ground, the left one hurrying to keep up. They landed behind her so that I had to step closer to retrieve them. She flinched.

“That’s not true,” I managed over my shoulder as I took off.

I wasn’t known for acts of physical violence, in fact this was my first one. As I ran home to lay all of this at my mother’s feet, I felt a frisson of satisfaction that I had taken such radical action against Carol’s slur. I hadn’t had many opportunities to stick up for my father.

In subsequent years, I haven’t pursued the violence, but I am still on the run from platitudes that issue forth in response to a loss. Since that fifth grade day, I have sat witness to my own grief, that of friends and loved ones, and of many counseling clients. I know we can do better.

Our society has trouble with grief. We can’t stand pain, and we want the bereaved to get over theirs before it upsets us. The few standard responses that people offer to the bereaved prove it. In fact, they aren’t much better than Carol’s childhood attempt. And the bereaved are usually too stricken, or too polite, or without their gym shoes, to respond as they’d like. Allow me to stand in for them.

He’s in a better place, the probably well-meaning comforter says.

What the bereaved would like to say: Oh yeah? His place is here by me. Spare me your easy version of heaven. And spare me the suggestion that I should feel guilty for my own pain. I have a big job to do – to come up with my own understanding of where he went and how I’m supposed to live without him here. And you’re not helping.

Another frequent attempt is: It’s God’s plan which you can’t yet understand.

To which the griever would like to answer: Since you seem to have a

straight line to God’s inner workings, can’t you do better than this flimsy attempt to make my tragedy palatable? My question is not how you explain this theologically. It is how I am going to make it through tonight.

Another common one: He wouldn’t want to see you suffer like this.

The unvoiced response from the bereaved: Don’t try to shame me into shoving my feelings underground. She didn’t want to die, and of course she wouldn’t want me to suffer, but she did and I am. Try to understand how connected I was to her and therefore how deep my feelings run.

The next is an imperative: You have to let go.

The griever’s response: Never. My job is to create a new relationship with her, now that she is no longer physically present. She will always be emotionally present for me. It is how she lives on. Don’t take that away from either one of us.

I have a suggestion for those who wish to offer comfort. Take up Frank McCourt. His book Angela’s Ashes recounts the endless suffering and tragedy of his poor Irish mother and her large brood. The words he remembers hearing beat the feeble lines above hands down:

I’m sorry for your troubles, the women say to each other with each new loss. Acknowledgement and caring. As simple as that. No pat explanations, no rush to judgment, no hurry.

If I had the chance to talk to the Carol of today, I would thank her for the nudge she gave me toward my life’s work. Chances are she would not even remember the incident, as it couldn’t have had the emotional punch for her that it did for me. But I wouldn’t apologize for the gym shoes. They taught me that even when words fail, I can still have my say.

CBH 06/11

THE FINE ART OF EAVESDROPPING

2011-05-08T19:54:00.000-07:00

THEME: AUTHORITY
He who establishes his argument by noise and command shows that his reason is weak.
~Michel de Montaigne

Ask any writer where their material comes from and the honest ones will tell you it’s from a lifetime of eavesdropping. Sitting in a coffee shop you can land like a paratrooper in the middle of the life of a stranger and find out more than you know about your best friend. Whatever you hear yourself, you have on good authority, I figure.

Sometimes you get only hints and have to construct the story yourself. Like the time I sat near an apparently former priest and an older woman breakfasting together. I got an earful about “that business” that caused him so much trouble in recent years in the church. I pegged her as a former parishioner, based on the delicate balance between devotion and flirtatiousness that ran between them.

Would that I’d had the opportunity to spy on the formerly up and coming Miami priest Fr. Alberto Cutie instead. He was seen making out on the beach with a comely parishioner. He apologized, resigned, and soon married his love. He just missed his calling the first time around, apparently. He has fleshed out the story in his new talk show and book called Dilemma, so there’s little mystery left there.

Back in the coffee shop, I had no such help. She was the listener and he was the talker, and they conversed carefully, as if in code, using vague references and generalities. Since they weren’t providing the specifics I craved, I had to run through a series of “what-ifs” until I came up with my own.

Was he a pedophile priest? No, too obvious. Maybe he’d covered up for another one and got caught in the crossfire. Maybe he had seen this companion through a crisis, and her loyalty caused her to give the bishop a piece of her mind in his defense. Maybe he refused to be sent away for reprogramming. And she defied the authorities and kept up contact with him. How’s that?

Thanks to eavesdropping, I do know for sure what it’s like to get a job in Hollywood. Last year I spent a Happy Hour at an upscale L.A. restaurant. While Dr. Drew of TV therapy fame sat at the bar head-swiveling to see or be seen, I concentrated on the group of three behind me. My husband kindly switched seats so I could zero in. Two name-dropping producers (“Harvey”, “the Network”) chatted with a young woman in a simple dress and heels, no hose. It all sounded like platitudinous cocktail talk, and I was drifting and about to actually talk to my husband when I heard The Ask. “”If you think you’d like to work on the project, we’d like to see it work out.”

What project? They’d been talking about how hard it is to stay in the good graces of former coworkers. It must have been code again.

“Yes, let’s have your people work it out with my lawyer,” she said. And she stood, shook hands, and was out the door. No gushing, no thank you for the opportunity, no money demand, no air kisses.

In my extension of her story, she jumps in her car, drives around the corner, stops under a palm tree and dials her boyfriend or her mom or bff and screams, “I got it. They want me. Omigod!”

Yesterday at the airport I had to work harder than that. I sat within range of a casually dressed middle-aged couple – shorts and a Hawaiian shirt for him, modest sundress for her – who chatted amiably about hometown stuff. They were on their way to Washington D.C.

A stocky man strode up and stood too close, right between them. He was dressed to kill in a blue blazer, yellow tie and lapel pin the size of a dime. Try as I might, I couldn’t read it, but you could tell it was saying something significant about him.

Right away he took a phone call and talked for five minutes at a volume just loud enough for passengers three banks of seats away to look up.

“Are you telling me that law enforcement officers failed to pursue their investigation?” he yelled into the phone. Pause. “You need to run this down for me.” Pause.

His ruddy cheeks glowed, a fine contrast with the yellow of his sideburns and moustache (think Yosemite Sam) and his tie.

“If the officers are going to be charged with any impropriety, I need to know it.”

Now that’s an episode of Law & Order right there.

But he was only beginning. Off the phone and still hovering over the couple, he addressed them in turn. It emerged that they were going to the same place for the same event, and that Mr. Important was in charge. He pointed his finger in her direction.

“Now Louise, you are just going to have to be satisfied on your own. It may not look like it when we’re at the bar at 11 at night having our beers, but we are Doing Business.”

“Don’t you worry about me, Bob,” she said, seeming to bask in his attention. “I haven’t been to D.C. in 15 years. I have a lot to explore.”

Her husband and his Hawaiian shirt were shrinking by the minute in the face of this windbag, and his wife’s engagement with him.

“And you, Jim,” Bob said, leaning even closer, “You will see just how hard we work at these things. It’s not a vacation, that’s for sure.”

Bob’s jaw tightened as he shot a glance at his wife, who continued to smile adoringly at guess who.

Damn. Boarding started, which allowed me only a moment to spot a crocheted cross dangling from Windbag’s roller bag. If only I’d had another ten minutes, I might have learned enough to put it in context .

After the flight, I witnessed the three of them walking through the terminal. Bob, still talking, strode along in between the couple, and took Louise’s elbow. Jim looked straight ahead. Questions presented themselves.

Would Louise secretly slip into Bob’s room while her husband was laboring at the bar? Would Jim finally punch his boss in the nose for his various humiliations? What was their business in D.C.? And why was he so LOUD? I was tired, so I settled for my best guess, that it was a plain old business trip and the nice couple doted on the overbearing boss to stay in his good graces. Not everything has to be a drama.

My final example is the most cringe-inducing. I waited in an upscale coffee shop for a writer friend for our monthly meeting when I heard one of those shrill voices you can’t ignore. It belonged to a woman I almost knew, who was married to an acquaintance of mine. Theirs was one of those matches that makes you wonder – the modest bookish man and the tight skirt-wearing, attention-seeking athletic woman.

I quickly gave up trying not to listen, as it immediately became clear that this was one intimate conversation, with her sister. There were many complaints – not enough time to train, being neglected while he was out of town, a lack of understanding of her needs. Her sister, probably working from a lifetime of listening to such, said little. I felt humiliation on his behalf, and sadness that he had to live with this resentment every day. And of course, a small recognition that she might know her marriage better than I did.

If it had been an episode of ABC’s What Would You Do? with John Quinones, I would have been expected to stride over and denounce her for inflicting the details of her marital dissatisfaction on a roomful of strangers. Luckily, my friend showed up and I switched my attention to my own business. By the time I left, the complainer was gone, her table cleared and waiting for the next occupant.

I know the outcome of this one. I heard several months later that the couple was divorcing, which maybe was a relief for all concerned. Easy for me to say, but I know now that better days followed for both. Was it a thrill to be inside this story as it unfolded? Decidedly not. I definitely prefer the ones I make up myself.

I don’t know how much actual knowledge I gain from my listening, but it is fun to practice attentiveness and give my imagination a workout. The next time you are offered an eavesdropping opportunity, I say seize it and let your inner storyteller out. It beats playing Angry Birds.

CBH 05/11

HITTING MY POLITICAL BOTTOM

2011-04-14T15:24:00.001-07:00

THEME: CHEAP THRILLS
The only thrill worthwhile is the one that comes from making something out of yourself. ~ William Feather

Hello. My name is Carolyn and I am a recovering political arguer. To qualify as recovering, I had to prepare a searching and fearless inventory of my p.a. past. Let me share the highlights:

At age 8, I canvassed the neighborhood with my mother for the Republican candidate for mayor of Chicago. His name was Bob Merriam. He was an author and reformer, a war veteran with a Bronze Star. The Democratic candidate, slated for the first time, was Richard J. Daley the Original. It is said that Merriam actually had a chance. Imagine what Chicago might be like by now if he had won. That day, people were either polite or not at home, and I got ice cream on the way back. I rather enjoyed it.

In college, I would entertain myself at parties poking at the politics of certain boyfriends of certain friends. But only if they started it. It was funny, mostly, a parlor game. It was a cheap thrill to have the power to get someone else so worked up. I was, of course, right.

Also in college, early in my budding relationship with my eventual husband, I was invited to dinner at the home of his aunt and his uncle, a WW II Marine. I’m not sure who started it, but by the time he had set me straight, I was in tears over the stroganoff. Lesson learned: politics can hurt.

In early adulthood, I was busy. We were no longer at war, nobody was getting drafted. Who had time to dither over politics?

Then came the Clinton administration, which put me through a lot. By the end of it I was of several minds. I was indignant that Hillary had been so pilloried. And disgusted with the weasely baseness of Bill’s sexual conduct with a girl close to the age of his own daughter for pity’s sake, and with his refusal to own up. At the same time I was impressed that he managed to dismantle some of the dependence-inducing welfare system without stripping the entire safety net, and that he pulled off a balanced budget on his way out.

To some people he was a disappointment. To others, he was the worst creature to ever walk the earth. It was then I noticed that people were suddenly delivering their opinions at the top of their lungs.

The Bush years only magnified the tension, and that polarizing trend really took off. There were only good guys and bad guys, and you were one or the other. I noticed that I didn’t like the attitude of the people I mainly agreed with any better than the ones I didn’t. Everybody was nasty.

Then the TV pundits came into their own, and built their little kingdoms of the air by attacking anyone who they could catch on tape, whether office-holder, candidate, spouse, minister, hanger-on, whoever. Then the pundits started in on each other, convincing journalists that what they said was news.

By the way, do you know what those pundits make per year from their fear-mongering and hate speech? Why, it’s an…..

No wait. I’m in recovery. I really am. Hold on. Deep breath….Another…Okay, I’m better now.

As I was saying, the byproduct of the ascendance of the pundits was that once we had watched them go at it for a time, we started in on each other. But this was no parlor game. This was for blood.

That’s when I began to retreat in earnest. I was sick to death of having to defend my beliefs, as if I’d somehow volunteered for the debate team and every day was a meet.

And now, I have retreated entirely. Because now I see clearly that in this climate, once anybody gets started, they can’t stop. Their positions migrate to the far ends of the spectrum, and the gulf opens even wider. Once the name-calling starts, I want to be in the car, speeding off.

When the political phone calls started up again this week – I got three in one day – to herald the opening of our upcoming 18-month descent into another presidential campaign, I decided to opt out from each one.

“Please take me off your calling list,” I say.

“But why?” they sputter, as if it’s a surprise that one of their targets has had enough. “I’m not going to change my mind,” I answer.

They hesitate, deciding whether to try to lure me back or move on. Before they can, I wish them well and hang up. It’s very liberating.

But I must be rigorously honest in my recovery, and must admit there is more to it than that. I also don’t want to participate in these exchanges because I don’t have to. We’re supposed to be free to disagree.

Don’t misunderstand. I vote. I care. I’m not shirking my civic responsibilities. I’m just abstaining from the conversation. I have never seen a political argument result in new learning or a changed position anyway. Ever.

I voted this week in a minor local election. Afterwards, I was chased to the parking lot by a middle-aged woman whose accent told me that she’d come here from halfway around the world.

“Can you help me?” she said. “I can’t tell which of the candidates are from which party.”

I told her it was a local school board election, and candidates didn’t run on a party ticket.

By that time, her husband joined us. He declared their party affiliation, and said, “So you see, we don’t want to vote for the enemy.”

Here they’d gone to all the trouble of finding a new country and becoming citizens of it, and they couldn’t vote without suspecting that their enemy was lurking. Did we instill that in them, or was that a vestige of what they’d left behind in their old country?

I kept to my pledge. “There are no parties for this,” I repeated.

“Who did you vote for?” she demanded.

“That’s private,” I said. “Besides, no one is supposed to try to influence someone else’s vote this close to the polling place. It’s a law.”

They backed away, exasperated, looking for someone else to ask. They were disappointed in me. But I wasn’t. I did have a preference in that election, but there’s a reason why voting booths have curtains.

I’m sure I’ll encounter temptation in the next 18 months, but I plan to maintain my silence. One day at a time.

CBH - 04/11

RUMORS OF ALICE SPRINGS

2011-03-14T14:11:00.000-07:00

THEME: RUMORS
Rumors generally grow deformed as they travel. ~ Edward Counsel

We arrived in Alice Springs on a jet plane. The airport was a modest affair with one building and a few luggage carts. We could barely breathe in the heat as we walked from the terminal to our bus. On the way to the hotel, our tour guide Mark lavished praise on us, for being the kind of travelers who would brave the Outback, not just luxuriate in the coastal cities of Australia.

All we could see outside the window was red sandy soil and scrub brush, and the occasional scruffy tree. The sky loomed large above us. It was bright blue, speckled with filmy clouds, and vast.

All we could think was the hotel must have air conditioning, right?

We reached the outskirts of town, expecting a dirt track of a frontier town, a simple crossroads in the Outback. What we saw instead was KFC, McDonalds, Target, T-shirt shops, and two indoor malls with food courts. What? It looked like a mini-U.S.

As we learned in the next few days, what we saw was a far cry from the beginnings of Alice Springs. We heard the tale of the early European settlers who set out expecting to work their civilizing magic on the primitive Outback. In the mid 1800s they planned to string it with telegraph lines and railroad tracks, and shorten the time it took for messages and goods to travel from Melbourne in the south all the way to Darwin in the north, eventually to England, and back. It turns out that they made some unfortunate assumptions, and that the Outback tamed them instead.

A set of early explorers found an area in the middle of the country surprisingly lush, and fed by an apparent underground spring. It was determined that this would be a fine place to locate the work teams that would build the telegraph line. Too bad that those explorers had visited briefly on the wettest day of all time, and that the spring had not been a spring but a puddle that was long gone by the time the settlers showed up.

I tried to imagine the settlers who finally arrived and found only scrub and red sand and no water, no spring. They must have looked at the same giant blue sky, felt the searing sun on their skin, and wondered what they’d gotten themselves into. Was it really worth risking your life in this harsh climate so that other people could get their messages around faster? Three weeks, three months, really what’s the difference?

Alice might have said the same. She was the wife of an early stationmaster, and naming the settlement after her was a customary courtesy. Even without a telegraph, she’d apparently heard rumors of the hardship in the bush. She never even came to visit, they say, and may have even found her way back to England where the lifestyle was more to her liking. The name stuck even if she didn’t.

The settlers were planning to impose their ways on the locale, but the task was greater than they imagined. They were invading an ecosystem that had evolved over thousands of years, made up of the hardiest of species. Plants that asked little from their surroundings, an odd assortment of animals, and the short dark-skinned aboriginal people all managed to survive here. Darwin would have had a field day studying how they managed.

In this world, the people didn’t wear clothes. Much of the animal life was hidden under the surface of the ground, like the four-foot long slugs that were a staple of the diet. That dried-out looking vegetation yielded the necessary amount of moisture, if you knew how to get it out. And those people had developed the right skin tone and habits to survive.

The aboriginal people were judged by the colonists, in the habit of colonists everywhere, to be uneducated savages, yet they had language, art, music, social structure, and a belief system that was expressed in intricate and carefully guarded ceremonies. They’d had 50,000 years to develop what they needed to live out here, and it didn’t include telegraphs and trains.

The day we visited the original site of Alice Springs, it was only 110 degrees. Five buildings sat facing each other, each still equipped with enough artifacts to reveal its use. The office looked like the sheriff’s office in every U.S. Western you saw on TV growing up – wooden desk, small window, and the tools of the trade. In the Westerns, it was a couple of jail cells, here a wall of first generation telegraph equipment. A wagon sat in the blinding sun in front of the stable. The stationmaster’s house, plain but for the chintz curtains, looked livable enough.

A framed picture captured the culture clash. The stationmaster stands proudly, shaking hands with a visitor dressed in a jacket and tie. To the side stands an aboriginal man dressed in the starched white uniform of a house servant. He looks absurdly out of context, his eyes fixed past the camera, maybe gazing out the window at the land he belonged on. There isn’t much said about this clash. You have to dig a little to find stories of the Europeans and the aboriginal people massacring each other, since they don’t fit the usual tourist-friendly narrative, but they exist. I’m sure there were also many heart-warming stories of attempts at mutual understanding, but in the end it is clear who came out on top. Masters at adaptability, the aboriginal people seem adept at resisting the influences of the dominant culture to this day.

It wasn’t only the aboriginal people who impeded the progress the colonists had in mind. In addition to the English officials, Australia was mainly settled by European outliers. Contrary to the dominant myth, the country was not a penal colony peopled by actual hard-nosed criminals. Instead, it received the results of a lower middle class purge that cleared out an unproductive layer of English society. Their crimes were largely petty crimes, not violent ones. Shipped halfway across the world and lacking the funds to return, they settled in and made the best of it. Understandably, they doubted very much that governmental edicts were designed to benefit them.

Therefore, when it was decreed that a national rail system would be built to enhance transportation of goods throughout the country, each of the five regions dug in. They each chose a different gauge for their railway that would extend only to the regional border. When they were done there was a country three-quarters the size of the U.S., crisscrossed with railroad tracks that could not connect with one another. You can just hear them chuckling under their breath, “Okay Mate, there’s your railroad. Happy now?”

So, the colonists got what they wanted. Aboriginal people wear clothes now, though there is still plenty of space between them and the dominant culture. The telegraph line got completed, and they had their new link to the world. A national railway was eventually constructed to supplant the five regional ones.

The yearning for connection continues. Internet cafes dot every city. Our great communicator Oprah visited as one of her final acts before her decommissioning, and travel reservations are up 30%.

Our last day in Alice Springs revealed the reason for the downtown concentration of fast food and retail giants. It is whispered that outside of town sits a joint secret defense base – secret only to incurious tourists, I think – where “scientists” (read “spies”?) monitor activities in the skies. How do you keep 2000 Americans happy in the middle of the Outback? You do the same things the colonists tried to do – provide the comforts of home. Which these days happily includes air conditioning.

Walking back to our hotel from town, we crossed a broad bridge that spanned a dry riverbed, the red sandy soil dotted with spiny light green bushes and the occasional tree. We heard voices in the dusk and looked to see several groups of 8 or 10 or 12 aboriginal people sitting in a circle. Dressed in bright colors, some of them wearing U.S. sports jerseys, they sat as if planted in the soil.

Sometimes one group would call to another, conserving the energy it would take to walk all the way in between. They were engaged with one another, and seemed oblivious to the passing tourists. We felt that we were intruding, and that our curiosity put them on display when they were just following their longtime daily habits. But really, how could we look away?

Our guide told us later that evening that seeing such a different and ancient way of life was part of the privilege of visiting the Outback. Just like we couldn’t overlook the urges of the colonists, and of the forced immigrants, we had to consider those of the people who had been there all along. What rumors must have spread among them when the pale visitors with their great plans arrived? And more recently, when the construction of a giant base is begun, or a KFC arrives? We can only guess.

CBH - 03/11

UNFINISHED BUSINESS

2011-02-14T13:58:00.000-08:00

THEME: FIGHTS
It's not the size of the dog in the fight; it's the size of the fight in the dog.
~ Mark Twain

As soon as we landed in Christchurch, New Zealand our group of 44 piled into a luxury bus equipped with soft seats in a flashy fabric and a bathroom. We met our driver Malcolm, a strapping blonde gent who over the next week was to narrate our way across his country. You could quickly see that Malcolm was not a chatterbox, but one of those folks who was worth listening to when he spoke.

It was January 22, 2011. He loaded our bags and we headed out of the airport on the exit lane. As he approached the traffic circle that would lead us to town, there was a loud clunk and we stopped dead. He shifted, and tried and this and that, but there we sat. His jaw twitched, he traded a couple of quiet comments with Mark, our cheerful guide, and got on the phone.

In ten minutes, a new bus pulled up and all able-bodied passengers were recruited to shift the bags into our new bus. It was a lovely example of patience by all concerned. We were on our way in about 20 minutes, start to finish. We didn’t think of our breakdown as an omen.

He drove us through the outskirts, neighborhoods of tidy small stone and frame houses divided by brick fences, each shielding a garden bursting with veggies and blooms. It was summer there so we saw the best of the vegetation, we were told. It felt very English.

When we reached the downtown, he pointed out the contrast between old buildings – old to them is the late 1800s – and stark modern structures that look like they snuck into all the spaces between the old ones. Some buildings had tarps over their top floors and were currently not occupied. One lot had a considerable pile of concrete blocks and slabs. We were told that a building had recently been removed from the site. The streets were busy with traffic and pedestrians. This was the central business district, Malcolm he said, in the middle of a workday.

He explained the damaged buildings and the rubble. On September 4, 2010 a 7.1 earthquake had hit Christchurch. While there had been extensive damage, most buildings were still in place. It had struck on a Sunday morning when the area was not crowded, and there was no loss of life. A 7.1 earthquake and no one was killed? Amazing. They had dodged a bullet there.

You can’t be in New Zealand for long before you hear about two things – volcanoes and earthquakes. The country sits on top of plates and faults and amid volcanoes, defunct and active. It is why their country is so mountainous and therefore so gorgeous, and why their lakes are the brilliant aqua color that makes the photographs look as if they’ve been doctored, from the volcanic minerals washed down from the mountains with their rains.

That very morning, Malcolm told us, there had been a 4.1 aftershock from that September earthquake, that shook things up for a few moments. If you live here, he said, you have to get used to the frequent aftershocks. With a tourist’s detachment, I thought, “Darn. I would have liked to see what that was like.” We wondered at the seemingly intact city – how could it survive such a strong quake and look this good?

We passed by a cathedral and were told that visitors could climb all the way to the top of the tower for a birdseye view of the city. We stopped for a traffic light nearby, in front of a seven-story building with a giant sign that said CTV, the Canterbury TV network. I peered into the windows at people at work inside. We’d barely looked at TV on the trip and it reminded me to tune in to see what it was like.

On another block, a striking modern house made up of poured concrete and windows was sandwiched in between a gray office building and a church. A dog looked out the window at us. None of the buildings were very tall it seemed. I’d have to ask if that was due to zoning, or earthquake threat, or both.

As we took the turn toward our hotel, we circled a giant stretch of parkland that included a golf course and multiple athletic fields. Banners announced a regional meet for disabled athletes. The signup table was a mob scene.

We passed by the hospital. A series of mismatched additions ringed the original old buildings. Even without the signs, it would be easily recognizable as a hospital. It was late afternoon, and nurses in scrubs hurried by on their way home, outpatients waited for the bus, an ambulance pulled in. This was nothing like the quiet orderliness of the suburbs.

At the hotel we checked in at the same time as a group of disabled athletes and watched as they sorted out their various types of wheelchairs, recumbent bikes and other equipment. We stepped back to get our wheeled suitcases out of their way.

Later that night, I read in the local paper about tussles between local officials and others who felt that bureaucratic delays had stood in the way of the repair of damaged buildings. Local politics, I thought, were the same everywhere, citizens always fighting about something. Tradesmen who had traveled to Christchurch hoping to help with the rebuilding were quoted in the article as being ready to leave in frustration because of the delays. I put away the paper and thought nothing more of it, until I went through a museum exhibit a few days later that included a simulation of an earthquake. Twelve of us entered a replica of a small house and the attendant closed the door behind us. It was set up with all kinds of familiar items, couches, tables, vases, picture frames, a TV set, all anchored down. The floor started to shake, the walls shifted, the floor tipped, and I lost my desire to experience an aftershock.

With 14,000 earthquakes a year, New Zealand has to be equipped for the 10% or so that may result in damage and possibly compromised buildings. After a quake, local engineers peruse each affected building and tag it green (okay), yellow (needs some reinforcement), or red (cannot be used without major structural work). This applied to Christchurch too.

During the whole trip, there was a hint of danger in the air. In the Australian outback we were regaled with stories of how well the Aboriginal people had learned over the centuries to withstand the harsh conditions, while newcomers, from the early Europeans to current travelers, repeatedly underestimated the heat, the dryness, the distances and ended up sprinkling their bones across the land.

And during our visit to the Great Barrier Reef, snorkelers had to wear special suits to fend off painful jellyfish contact. We learned too that Australia has the greatest number of lethal creatures on earth. And since the Aussies drive on the left, every time you stepped off a curb you had to calculate which direction the speeding cars you might walk out in front of were coming from.

Before we arrived, the Queensland region of Australia had been hit by massive flooding. While we were still on the trip, but had moved on to New Zealand, Yasi, a Katrina-sized cyclone, hit the same area. Towns were severely damaged and the flooding resumed.

For the rest of the trip, we watched TV in earnest, the news reports bouncing between protests in Egypt and weather in Queensland. Maybe the workers in the Christchurch TV office building were working on those stories. We didn’t think of ourselves, or them, being at risk. The town survived the big one, so what could an aftershock do?

We returned home with pictures to download and stories to tell and jet lag to overcome. Two weeks later, on February 22, 2011, Christchurch was hit with a 6.3 earthquake, midday on a work day. I found out about it on Facebook, from a relative’s post that his son, who was also traveling in New Zealand, was safe. I rushed to CNN and saw that many of the buildings we had seen were in ruins. The cathedral was the backdrop for every news report. Its steeple was down, the roof caved in. Only rescue workers were allowed inside, to see if any worshippers or tourists were trapped.

The priest, the mayor, terrified mothers searching for their children were interviewed. On the next report, the death toll was mounting from the initial 20. Two hundred were missing, then 300. It brought back the memory of September 11 in New York, with hope in the beginning that people would be rescued, saved by a desk, or a doorway. It soon became clear that only a few people would emerge from those ruins alive.

The third report showed a pancaked office building where the bulk of the missing were thought to be. It was the CTV building, that housed not only the network, but a foreign language school and other offices.

Those workers I spied on through my bus window, had they been out for lunch or in there with the flattened building coming down on them? The mother of one of them told a reporter that she kept calling her daughter’s cell phone, hoping that even if she could not answer it, a rescuer might hear it and know where to look for her.

After official analysis, it turned out that the February earthquake was really an aftershock from the September quake – unfinished business from the initial event that hadn’t seemed so bad. And that the buildings that came down this time had stood there damaged and waiting for disaster for months. It could have happened while I was riding by on the bus, while the nurses were walking home, or during a visitor tour of the cathedral. But it waited for lunchtime on a busy work day on what everyone assumed was just another normal day.

Those fights over buildings and repairs and delays weren’t just about politics or bureaucracy. They were about life and death. And unfinished business that was worth fighting about.

I’m haunted by the mother, calling her daughter again and again, not giving up hope until she had to. I wish she knew that another mother halfway across the world remembers her, and her daughter.

CBH - 02/11

HEARING THE CHANT

2011-01-14T13:50:00.000-08:00

THEME: PAYING ATTENTION
I think the one lesson I have learned is that there is no substitute for paying attention. ~ Diane Sawyer

It was Saturday, February 4, 2011. The Auckland Hop On Hop Off bus was transporting us through our last full day in New Zealand. We had already seen the grass-covered cone of an extinct volcano that sits above the city. I snapped a photo of my daughter peering into the top, while we tried to imagine what it had looked like 60,000 years ago when it was spewing lava. We couldn’t.

We’d also passed a suburban park with its own sheep, chomping grass within feet of the busy road. There are 4,000,000 people in New Zealand and 45,000,000 sheep. After a few days it seemed normal to see them anywhere.

We climbed off at the museum which sits above the city in a huge park. We looked down on a cricket match which we couldn’t understand and climbed the steps to the museum which we figured we could. We’d heard about the Maori show there, an authentic depiction of the music and practices of the indigenous people of New Zealand.

We were ushered into an elaborately carved meeting house, asked to remain silent for a welcoming ceremony, and then guided through a series of songs, games and dances. There was a cast of eight, 4 women and 4 men, dressed in traditional garments of muted patterns and ornamental beads. The men wore elaborate loincloths, the women grass skirts. The men held guitars, the women tucked poi balls at the waist. The oldest and most serious member of the troupe narrated.

When the women danced, there was a hula-like sway; when the men did there was a fierceness, emphasized by their protruding eyes and extended tongues. Like all indigenous people, they’d had plenty of visitors that they wanted to scare off.

Midway through the program, the narrator introduced a series of chants. In the absence of a written language, she told us, such chants had allowed the people to remember and carry on their traditional ceremonies. The first one was peppy and harmonious, something that might have found its’ way into South Pacific. The second one was slow, sad and haunting. And long.

The show moved to games done with hoops and sticks that were tossed back and forth with increasing speed while drums set the pace. This was for fun, she explained, but also to build the warriors’ speed and coordination so they would be ready for battle.

At the end of the program, she invited the audience members to approach any of the cast members with questions or comments. Most filed out with a nod and a thank you. I had to ask about that song. And I had to ask her, the serious one.

“It sounded so sad,” I said, “who would sing it and when?”

She looked up, maybe grateful that someone had heard.

“It is a lament,” she said, “to be sung during the mourning ritual.”

I knew it. I know grief when I hear it.

“What is that like,” I wanted to know.

“There is a gathering of all the people affected, that lasts for three days,” she explained.

“And what happens?”

“Crying. Crying by everyone. And singing of laments.”

“And then?”

“On the fourth day, there is no more crying. There is laughter, and stories, remembering the person’s ways.”

“That must be quite a day.”

She looked up and caught my eye. “Today is a very sad day. We lost an important person today, early this morning.”

She told about a well-known Maori woman who had pioneered a movement in the arts community to preserve the traditional arts and ceremonies. There were two purposes, she said. One, to bring the old ways to the next generations, the other to teach Kiwis and visitors about the Maori culture. If we don’t, they would be lost, she said.

This woman was so well-known, she explained, and so revered that, “for her, it will take a week,” since so many people were affected by her passing.

“You will miss her,” I said.

“Many will miss her,” she replied.

We parted with a smile and a thank you, and she turned to see if she had other questioners. She did not. They had all filed out to discover the rest of the museum, or take in the sunshine outside. Summer was ending, and it was time to go back to school. Families hurried on to the next thing on their schedule, on a waning Saturday afternoon. We had to go catch the bus so that we didn’t miss the transportation museum where we could see a replica Auckland street from the early 1900s. And then on to the shopping street where we could grab one last gelato.

I liked what I’d learned. Gather, cry, sing, then remember and appreciate. Worth remembering.

CBH - 01/11

MY TV HALL OF FAME

2010-12-16T13:41:00.001-08:00

ENDINGS

If you want a happy ending, that depends, of course, on where you stop your story.

~ Orson Wells

I have friends who claim that they do not watch TV. They are too high-minded to engage with the sludge of popular media. “I never turn it on,” they declare, patting themselves on the back. Liars. Lure them into a conversation and they turn out to be surprisingly well-informed about the latest plot twists in Brothers and Sisters or The Good Wife.

Me, I make no such claims. I’m still making up for lost time because I spent several of my formative years with no TV. In fact, I have created a personal TV Show Hall of Fame. Let me tell you about my top ten.

First off, in the days before the big RCA console conked out, every Saturday morning found me searching frantically for a green-tinged plastic sheet. It was supposed to be in the lamp table drawer, but sometimes migrated to the living room closet or the desk. I was in such a hurry because Windy Dink was starting, and how could I connect dots or decode messages without my magic drawing screen to slap on the TV screen? It was the birth of interactive media and I was there.

I left Winky Dink before it was cancelled, as I grew beyond such kiddie games. But it left me with a life lesson. I resolved not to reenact those harried searches anymore. Now I pretty much know where everything is at all times. Though some things still migrate.

Overlapping with the end of Winky Dink came my second entry, The Uncle Johnny Coons Show which I watched daily over my tomato soup and grilled cheese when I came home from school for lunch. My favorite part – the Crusader Rabbit cartoons. I even sent in for a decal of Johnny’s head that we ironed onto a dish towel, which made him an even bigger presence. I don’t remember it, but I’m told that he ended his relationship with all of us young viewers one day when he signed off as usual. Thinking that the mic was off, he then said, “Well, that ought to hold the little bastards.” It was a less open-minded age then, and he was through. Nowadays, he would get 10 million hits on YouTube and his own reality show.

My mother, trending toward adult pursuits, substituted As the World Turns which soon led to the addition of General Hospital. I count them #3, because all those lunches with all those people with all those endlessly repeating problems fascinated me. Early job training for my life as a therapist? Possibly.

Then came the dry spell. The RCA fizzled out. It could not be fixed and was carted off to TV heaven leaving a giant void in the living room and in my life. I was sidelined, and while TV advanced, all I had was bits and pieces I’d hear from my friends or glimpses I’d snatch at their houses.

My favorite night of the month was church committee meeting night when Mom would drop me off at the permissive household of the Summerhill family where I could watch 77 Sunset Strip and Johnny Carson. A dream come true, but they didn’t make my Hall of Fame due to my limited access.

My mother was steadfast and uninterested in restoring my TV life. She bought me an encyclopedia instead. In early adolescence I finally wheedled her into buying a flashy little red portable and I plugged back in, but I was forever behind.

It was summer, the first time I didn’t come home for the summer break from college. My roommates and I lived over a laundromat in campustown. We rushed home from our classes to gather in front of our little TV to watch Dark Shadows, my #4, the tale of vampire Barnaby Collins and his lady loves. It was thrilling, romantic, and very creepy. The end of summer brought that to a close, and it was time for me to prepare for adult life.

It was perfect timing. That Girl Ann Marie showed up in the person of Marlo Thomas to give me a glimpse of how a nice girl-career girl survives in New York City. It became my 5th entry. She had a good-humored boyfriend named Donald Hollister, and an easily-alarmed father looking out for her. My friends and I met in the housemother’s living room every week to watch and imagine our budding lives. Maybe we could have it all like Ann Marie – career, love, adventure.

The next transition was easy, to my #5, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, with Mary throwing her hat into the air in excitement. While her TV producer dreams came true, her romantic ones lagged behind. Her work life was a lot more complicated than Ann Marie’s, and she counted heavily on her friends to get her through. By the final episode when the whole news team sidled across the floor in a group hug to get a Kleenex, I knew what was in store for me. They pointed out what I’d already figured out, that life can change in a flash, so you’d better be ready.

Before I knew it I was a grownup with my own husband, in search of a show we could both agree on. I know for a fact that nobody but us remembers Petrocelli, because I’ve asked around, but it makes my #6. Barry Newman played a young lawyer who lived in a trailer out in the desert where he planned to build his dream house. It only lasted two seasons and he never got around to that house. Hmmm. Dreams imagined but not realized. Duly noted.

By then Lou Grant had come back to life in his own series as a newspaperman with two young assistants (Linda Kelsey as Billie and Robert Warden as Joe) who he ran all over town searching for the real story. I named them #7 because I so wanted to be on that team. And I could have used a mentor like Lou to toughen me up.

Once the kids showed up, we needed a family show. My kids tell me that they wanted to watch Golden Girls, but I said it was too risqué, but that doesn’t sound like me at all. I am very broad-minded and oppose censorship. Instead, we settled on Quantum Leap, which became #8. Dr. Sam Beckett, played by Scott Bakula, was trying to get back home from a time travel experiment gone wrong. Every week he would pop up in a new place, a new time and a new identity, always with a mission to set something right. At the end, he would leap and land is his new locale with an “Oh Boy!” Wow, what would it be like not to recognize yourself, or know anything about the people around you or what is expected of you? Good training for picking up cues and figuring things out on the fly maybe, but boy, would you want to get home.

Then we moved into the glory years of the Chicago Bulls and our family’s attention moved to their games. By the time we looked up, the kids were growing and leaving, and family TV night was history.

David and I tried to keep it up in the first year of empty nesthood with The Education of Max Bickford on Sunday nights, another show that no one else remembers. College professor Richard Dreyfuss was raising a teen daughter and young son alone while being tempted by a prickly former student/former lover now professor Marcia Gay Harden. Great portrayal of kids, great cast, good enough to qualify as #9. One season.

“Wait,” I thought, “you create this whole world and invite me in to empathize with your characters, and now you slam the door in my face?” No fair.

Julia Keller of the Tribune knows my pain. She recently wrote about abandoned viewers like me, “We’re supposed to love again. But that’s like asking a widow for a date on the way home from the cemetery.” One thing I like about Julia – she’s smart as they come, yet admits that she watches TV.

After so many goodbyes, my expectations dwindled. I turned to Law and Order reruns, and had a one-season affair a couple of years ago with a new series called Cupid before it was gone. David retreated into sports and more sports, and animal shows. These days we do manage the occasional House episode. He likes the bad attitude; I like the medical mystery.

I know I am supposed to just DVR everything now like my friends do, and gleefully fast forward through the commercials, but I enjoy the serendipity of what I happen to stumble across. I see new shows but I’m reluctant to give myself over to them. I have more important things to do, don’t I? Wait, am I turning into one of them, the superior ones who scorn TV, or just protecting myself from further pain? I think it’s the latter.

I make them work to attract me now. If a new show can draw me in, they still have an opportunity to make the list. Currently, Castle is vying with The Good Wife for the #10 slot.

I guess my TV life has been a fair representation of the rest of life. Something/one is a perfect fit, for a while. Then things change. One of you moves on and you must regroup. Your companions change, your interests too. There is always an ending around the corner.

What ends leaves something behind, though. It can be a dish towel, or an ambition, or knowledge about times and places you’ll never see, or a memory of who you were when it was part of your life. That’s good enough for me.

CBH 12-10

THE SPOT YOU STAND ON

2010-11-15T13:38:00.000-08:00

BOUNCING BACK - A hard fall means a high bounce... if you're made of the right material. ~Unknown

I sat in my fourth grade art class, flummoxed. I stared at the large piece of art paper, my 48 crayons standing ready. The assignment: Draw a picture of your dad for Fathers’ Day.

It was 1956 and I was the only kid in the class who had a problem with this. I approached the teacher, careful to keep my voice low.

“Mrs. Albright,” I said, “My father died.”

“Oh, well then,” she replied, “An uncle? Your grandfather?”

I shook my head.

“Do you want to just do a picture of your mother instead?”

Good. Clarity. Permission to do the only logical thing. I turned out a very nice giant head of my mother in her pearl earrings which she rarely wore, but which gave a bit of glamour to my picture. As I glanced at my classmates’ pictures, I had that familiar outsider feeling, my nose pressed to the glass of their normal families.

If you would have asked me then about my life story, it would have been all about differences. I was an only child on the Irish Catholic South Side of Chicago; the second tallest girl in the class, and absolutely no good at high jump. I couldn’t ride a bike. I’d had one briefly, but it got lifted from the storage room at my building. I would blush if anyone so much as glanced at me, which provided a direct window into my insecurities, a source of torture for me. And I was afraid of dogs.

For balance, I was a good student, also a very polite girl and a good friend. I had the nicest mother, and plenty of great relatives even if they were in two different states and I only saw them once a year.

By high school, I would have told you that I was coming out of the shrinking violet stage – I was editorial editor on the school paper, had some dates, and could see a big future for myself. But I still felt encapsulated by the idea that everyone else knew more than I did about how families, and life, really worked.

I can’t pinpoint exactly when I stopped minding my differences. Some of them fell away, others became unimportant, and others became points of pride. I took up Pilates instead of high jump. I rarely blush these days, and can pretty much talk to anyone about anything. My father may have died early, but my mother hung on until she was almost 89.

I have greatly revised my life story with time. I bounced back from my original outsider status. And I know now that my strengths came out of those early challenges. I had to grow a backbone to take care of myself in the world. All that watching other people’s lives developed empathy that I turned into my career as a therapist. I don’t need to make out Gratitude Lists; I have a built-in appreciation for the gifts of life, which I know are all the more precious because they may not last.

As a result I tell myself what I tell my clients: No one else on the planet has seen what you have seen; has encountered what you have, both good and bad. No one else has your combination of gifts and insights, or will ever occupy the spot you stand on. So, forget fitting in. The world would be incomplete without you just as you are, like a quilt missing its most vivid piece.

Note: A shorter version of this piece may be posted by now at www.thisibelieve.org, a reincarnation of the classic Edward R. Murrow radio series from the 1950s. Go to read hundreds of pieces from current contributors and from the original series.

CBH 11-10

UP IN SMOKE

2010-10-15T13:35:00.000-07:00

OUT OF THE ASHES - It's best to have failure happen early in life. It wakes up the Phoenix bird in you so you rise from the ashes. ~ Anne Baxter

It was a sunny Saturday morning. I trailed my friends around a lovely suburban garden center on a sunny Saturday morning. More enthusiastic gardeners than I, they examined odd varieties of ferns and rusty garden sculptures while I daydreamed. Old college friends, we gather every once in a while to talk for hours and tour around spots of interest while our husbands go off to regress into their long-ago frat boy selves, to everyone’s entertainment, especially theirs.

My cell phone rang and my heart sank when I saw it was a counselor who worked with me in my practice. Sigh. This must be a client crisis bad enough that she had to notify me.

“Maraline,” I said, “What’s up?”

“Where are you?” she asked.

“Um, Elburn, or St. Charles, not sure. For the weekend,” I said.

“You don’t know what happened to the office then,” she said.

“No.”

“There was a fire. Last night,” she said.

“Oh,” I said, relieved that we weren’t dealing with a suicidal client or a child abuse report.

“No one was in the building. They think it started around 11 o’clock,” she told me.

“Well, that’s good. I’ll be back Sunday night. I can deal with it Monday.”

“You don‘t understand. It burned down. To the ground. There is no office anymore,” she said.

Unimaginable. I loved that office. In a shared suite building, its two counseling rooms, small administration space, and a large group room we reserved a couple of nights a week for groups provided just what we needed and nothing more. And we had a private storeroom in the basement where twenty years worth of counseling files were secured. I had downsized into that building and it fit perfectly.

I had friends and friendly acquaintances in that building, other counselors and massage therapists, an investment guy, an outplacement consultant, a dentist, an accountant, a couple of lawyers, all held together by the personable front desk secretary who always said yes and never made a face when you asked something of her.

“You need to come now. To see if you can salvage anything,” she said.

Salvage anything? What? Goodbye garden center. Goodbye carefree weekend.

“Thanks, Maraline, for calling,” I said, “I guess,” attempting humor.

“I just left there,” she said, about to deliver the line I needed to hear to get me into action. “Some of our stuff is strewn in the parking lot. I picked up what I could.” she asked.

Yikes. Client files in the parking lot? Nooooo.

“Okay, I’m on my way.”

“Can I meet you there?” she offered.

“Um, no. I’ll call you if I need to.” I had no idea what I was saying.

I rallied my friends, who also offered to help, and got them to take me back to pick up my car at the house where we were staying. No, thanks, I’d go myself; I could handle this. Why ruin their much-anticipated day? I arranged to meet them later for dinner at a restaurant in a nearby town.

I had accomplished step one of my usual crisis management protocol: Refuse help.

In the car I was strangely calm, yet disoriented. Where was the map? Which expressway am I looking for? How could this have happened? That’s when I had my first good idea of the day. I called my daughter, recently returned from college for the summer.

“Kate, I’m coming to pick you up. My office burned down. “

“Whoa, okay,” she said.

“Get out the crow bars and some bags. And a hammer. I’ll be there in 30 minutes. And those file boxes in the basement. And wear crummy clothes.” I was starting to function, moving into my second step: Do something, anything, because everything is fixable.

I picked up Katy and took my usual 40 minute route to the office. As we rounded the final corner, I saw a pile of debris, unrecognizable as the two-story office building of a certain age, well beyond its peak but still quite serviceable. It had been light brick with tan and brown trim. The pile looked gray, with boards jutting toward the sky, and occasional accent colors – a green filing cabinet, a red table top, a yellow sign.

“Whoa,” Katy said again, capturing it perfectly. Wisps of smoke arose from the middle of the pile. One fire truck remained, and a firefighter trained water on the smoking debris.

We started walking the perimeter, trying to get our bearings. Our office must have been about there in the middle. The top floor had collapsed into the basement, but why couldn’t I spot a thing that was ours? Everything seemed displaced, upside down.

Several of my co-tenants climbed around the edges, gathering stray bits of their professional lives. Everyone looked as dazed as I felt, and as our eyes met, we shook our heads.

“Are you finding anything?” I asked.

“Not much,” they said.

I saw the accountant from across the hall. “I think I saw some of your paperwork over there,” she said, pointing toward the back corner of the lot.

How did it get all the way over there, thirty feet beyond the outer walls?

“Thanks,” I said, “Did you find yours?” She must have had years’ worth of client financial information in her computer.

“I came over as soon as I heard about it last night, and one of the firefighters retrieved my computer for me.”

Uh oh. I was seriously behind. We chased down the paperwork she had spotted, and spent the next seven hours gathering up any evidence of Healy & Associates that had escaped the inferno. Katy and her crowbar broke into bent file cabinets that had been hauled up from the storage room and dumped at the far corner of the parking lot by heavy machinery. The files that were water-logged we placed in boxes to take to the shredding company. The rest reeked of smoke, and we placed them in bags to go home with me, until we ran out.

My in-laws showed up, eager to find out what they could do to help, and we sent them to Dominick’s for plastic bags. They returned with so many that we could bag everything we came up with over the next days, and then use the remainder at home for the next five years.

When we got too hot, we walked across the street to Arby’s to get lemonade and snacks. When we got too tired, we would stop and talk with co-tenants. We repeated this for the next four days, until the equipment came to haul the pile away. With every day, we grew bolder, venturing into the debris further and further trying to decode the logic of the pile. We walked tightrope style on wobbly boards, searching for our relics.

We finally located the epicenter of our operation and found the roll of “20 years of excellence” stickers I had ordered in a fit of self-congratulation, the seal embosser we used on official documents, and the Mickey Mouse mouse pad, also a melted calculator, and the CONFIDENTIAL stamp we put on all records. I even found a section of our plaid couch and cut some fabric from it just because I‘d never see it again.

We eventually found the computer under two feet of someone else’s stuff. Even though the case was bashed in and the components melted, I later took it to an expert to insure that the data was gone.

Once I had it, and took the recovered files home to air out on my garage floor, I started to relax. At least no one could wander into the site and invade my clients’ privacy. By then, I had begun step three of my crisis process: Compare this mess with how much worse it could have been, and be glad.

With the building gone, I embarked on my next step: Trudge ahead. I talked turkey with the counselor who was my mainstay, and she agreed to continue with me despite the upheaval. A dear old friend offered me the use of his counseling space until we could relocate. I dealt with the intricacies of insurance documentation. And I spent hours of my life which I will never get back on the phone with the phone company, hearing, believing, and then no longer believing strings of unkept promises about when our phone number would be functioning again. While I never cried about the fire, Ameritech had me in tears more than once.

By the time I went out to shop for new office space, I was getting my spirit back. It was fun to imagine a new look, in a new space, closer to the Interstate, closer to my house, in a newer building with an elevator. I furnished it quickly but with enthusiasm. I picked out some art work, and the building put down new carpet. Within a month, we opened. It looked great.

At home, much later, I carried out my next step: Create a balance sheet of what I’d gained and lost. I preserved some of my hard-won artifacts in a shadow box I still keep in my current office, next to the picture of the disaster site – including melted pens, the charred office items, twisted doorknob, office keys.

I tallied what we never found – the gate leg table my husband and I refinished as our first dining table, the painting of a rainy street I’d bought while I was in college, notes from dozens of seminars I’d attended, and much more that either went up in smoke or was buried forever under the charred ruins, now scraped away to a landfill somewhere.

I had lost the company of my co-tenants, the built-in clerical support I counted on, and my comfortable routine. But I also lost the burden of maintaining all that stuff. The files that had filled up a storeroom now fit in two filing cabinets.

On the what-I-gained side, I made several additional entries, starting with a new insight that when someone offers help, you probably should accept it. I also gained a renewed conviction that what my practice did was worthwhile and important to continue. By that time managed care had already taken a bite out of the bottom line, but the other rewards were still rich. Combine that with my innate determination not to buckle under to disaster, and I formed a picture of myself as one of those blow-up clowns that gets punched and pops back up. I was reminded that all I really needed to continue was a room and two chairs. The rest was window dressing. So ultimately I ended up with a new start, lighter on my feet and clear about my purpose.

That first night though when I arrived at dinner late, all cleaned up and in a dress, I was unsure how it would all turn out. I’d called to tell them to go ahead and order, but being the friends they are, they snacked and drank and waited until I got there. If I remember right, I got a standing ovation when I walked in, or at least a toast. We ordered steaks, and I told a few stories from the day, but mostly relaxed into the normalcy of their company. In the morning, I’d have to return to disaster mode, but at the table my final step of the day kicked in: Loss helps you appreciate what you still have.

CBH 10-10

THE LEGACY OF PAUL POWELL

2010-09-15T09:51:00.000-07:00

CORRUPTION - Corruption is like a ball of snow, once it's set a rolling it must increase. ~ Charles Caleb Colton

As a lifelong resident of Illinois, I was brought up on corruption. One of my favorite examples comes from 1970. Paul Powell was Secretary of State. Two days after his unexpected death, $800,000 in cash was discovered squirreled away in his home/hotel room in shoe boxes, along with 49 cases of whisky, 14 transistor radios and 2 cases of creamed corn, presumably ill-gotten gains from his $30,000 per year position. I was fascinated that anybody could have that assortment in their closet. And at the lack of security – anyone could take off with that cash and who could he report it to?

Since then we have seen three governors end up in prison: Otto Kerner (conspiracy, perjury, income tax charges), Dan Walker (fraud), George Ryan (bribes), who may be joined by the impeached Rod Blagojevich who will be retried (pay to play, lying to FBI) next year.

How could this continue to happen, one wonders. The answers are especially easy to come up with in this political season that has shown us a world-class display of mud-slinging and a complete absence of rational discussion. We know that corruption thrives not just in Illinois, though we do appear to provide a particularly rich Petri dish for its propagation. We know that it lives elsewhere too because we have the opportunity to enjoy the most outrageous ads from other states on the evening news, night after night. Follow this link http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/10/29/2010-the-year-in-campaign_n_776270.html to see some examples (including the Carly Fiorina Demon Sheep ad) of where that money went. Typically, the news segment about outrageous ads ends with journalists shaking their heads in disapproval as if they were innocent in all this. Not so much.

Just like the Hollywood stars and the paparazzi who trail them, our politicians are involved in a host-parasite relationship with hangers-on who live off of them while providing what they can’t do without – attention.

Take the news industry. Venerated Meet the Press host Tim Russert explained his approach this way – he studied the positions of his guest, took the opposite tack in his questioning, and made an interesting show out of it. Nothing wrong there. We certainly want journalists to keep track of our candidates, but their increasingly rabid reporting of each and every unsubstantiated charge, misstep, overheard conversation, and personal peccadillo, as if they were more important than their positions on the issues, serves to stir the pot. They end up reporting on the frenzy their reports cause instead of the actual news.

At the same time, the advertising industry and TV and radio stations get their own stimulus packages with each political cycle. This year it’s as if it’s become a reality show: How Low Will They Go? The most outrageous charges, vitriolic attacks; the interviews with actors (or are they real voters, so well informed that they are outraged at the opponent’s very existence, when most people have trouble even remembering who their Senator is?) who scold and castigate.

Can you think of any better way to spend the $3 billion that was just spent on political ads this year? Like ending world hunger, reducing the deficit, or just spending it on consumer goods to jumpstart the economy?

At least the political season has an ending date. Imagine if the advertising folks applied this approach to their regular clients all year long. Burger King ads might end with, “Why does this Ronald Mc Donald continue to lurk around innocent children? Have you checked your local sex offender registry lately, for a guy with big shoes and red hair? And what’s with the red lipstick?”

Or Duracell on the Energizer Bunny: “Just how does that bunny keep on going and going? Ask Marian Jones, or Lance Armstrong, or Barry Bonds what they think. That is your battery on steroids. Is that what you want to run your children’s toys?” We’d finally have to turn off the TV for good.

Which brings us to the candidates themselves. Eric Zorn of the Chicago Tribune called this year’s candidates for Illinois Governor and Senate “as flawed and uninspiring a quartet of glad-handers as ever aspired to lead and represent our state.” Nicely put.

While their cause is being advanced by the amoral advertisers, behind the scenes the candidates sink lower and lower. The more they accuse and blame and threaten us with each other, the more anxious we all get, until we reach the current country-wide anxiety attack. The sky is falling, and we each get the chance to bet on one side or the other to stave off disaster. Oh no. What if we guess wrong? Catastrophe!

At least two corrupting influences operate here. First, what the candidates have to do to raise the money necessary to participate in this system. They may not be keeping it in shoeboxes, but what kind of promises do they make to come up with that $3 billion? And how will that keep them from doing what they should?

Some solve that problem by funding their own campaigns, like Illinois Lt. Governor candidate and pawnbroker Scott Lee (Not a Career Politician) Cohen who put $2.1 million into his race. After some revelations about his personal life, he was chased out by the party. Once he decided that leaving was a mistake, he dropped back in and siphoned an additional $3.8 million into his new independent campaign. In California, it’s worse. Ex-eBay CEO Meg Whitman makes Cohen look like a penny-pincher. She has put up $141.6 million of her own in her run for governor (which sounds like a lot until you find out she is worth $1.9 billion).

What is the payoff for such extravagance? What is it about holding the office that would justify that investment? It must be the second corrupting influence, power. What sort of megalomaniac would make that tradeoff? Besides, if they spend like that to get elected, how will they spend our money once they get there? I can predict their outcome – elected or not, especially not, it won’t be worth it.

Wait, you say? What if it’s a desire to serve, an altruistic motive? Perhaps, but there are thousands of ways to help make things better that send resources directly to people who need them, not into a political system that yields nothing tangible in the end but a pile of receipts in a zero sum game.

As soon as we can look back on this election season with some distance, maybe we’ll find some pluses. While we have so much else to worry about with the economy and security, maybe the excess and vitriol we’ve just seen will finally be enough, and we’ll come up with some candidates next time around who can do better; candidates who won’t corrupt our open exchange of ideas with their fear-mongering and power-grabbing.

Maybe we’ll manage to ratchet up our own expectations for intelligent discussion of the issues instead of gotcha politics.

And maybe we’ll be able to recognize that things naturally run in waves, that power inevitably flows from one place to another over time, that no one side is ever entirely right or entirely wrong, and most importantly, that people who disagree don’t have to despise each other. Maybe we can convince our politicians that the rest of us want to see cooperation and problem-solving. Our communal anxiety would recede. The people who could pull that off would win, hands down.

CBH 09/10

BORROWING MAGIC

2010-08-15T13:37:00.000-07:00

Borrowing - I not only use all the brains that I have, but all that I can borrow. ~ Woodrow T. Wilson

My first book incident occurred when I was eight. My mother discovered me hiding under the covers late at night with a copy of E.B. White’s Charlotte’s Web and a flashlight. She ordered me to turn it off and get to sleep. She did not see the tears streaming down my cheeks – you can tell where I was in the story – so did not perceive that there would be no going to sleep until I finished it. Despite my generally compliant nature, I waited about ten seconds after she left before I flipped the light on and plunged back in. Any reader would understand.

When I was 41, I moved to a new town that left me with a 40 minute commute five days a week. Looking for a way to make the most of the time, I borrowed my first book on tape. At the time I’d been too wrapped up in child-raising and business-running and personal exhaustion to fit in anything so self-indulgent as reading fiction. I worried a little that I might drive into a ditch as the story took off, but a new channel seemed to open in my brain to allow me to keep track of both listening and driving. With the first words of Maeve Binchey’s Glass Lake, I was transported to midcentury Ireland by the lilting narration. I grabbed the case expecting to see a good old Irish name – O’Connell, Murphy, Duffy, but no, the narrator with the perfect brogue was named – Barbara Rosenblatt? I was hooked – this was some new world. Ever since, like any addict, I monitor my supply of audio books, and carry two or three backups in case I finish the current one far from the library.

This summer I had another book moment. I was caught up in The Help, Kathryn Stockett’s story of a young Southern woman with progressive leanings who tries to fit back into her traditional hometown after college, set at the dawn of the civil rights movement. The author depicts the intersection of her character’s privileged life and the lives of the black servants employed by her family and all the other white families of means. Stockett took chances, in the use of black dialect that could offend, for instance, and her failure to include any white characters with a conscience beyond her heroine. But you could tell where her heart lay.

I reached that familiar stage of sadness that the book is almost over and urgency to find out how it ends. When I shut the book for the last time, I began my conversation with the author: why did you have to wrap it up so neatly and so quickly? When didn’t you spend more time on the central mystery – what happened to Constantine, the main character’s nanny? I was disgruntled. I was disappointed. I was mad.

But I knew better. Where do I get off telling someone else how to tell her tale? I guess I get off because I just invested hours of my time in her story. I had formed a relationship with this book and felt it let me down at the very end.

What makes up this relationship? It begins with the author’s impulse to write, in this case about an era she witnessed and had some unfinished business with. There are plenty of other reasons to write. Some of us get through life by scratching out journal entries that put our thoughts and feelings in order. And we write, well, email, to keep our relationships current. And we write to make ourselves clear, in business and in life. And sometimes, we write because someone asks us to, about things we would rather forget.

Looking to understand the effect of writing things down, researcher James Pennebaker (Opening Up, 1990) asked subjects to write for 15 minutes 4 days in a row about the worst trauma they’d ever experienced. Control subjects were told to write about trivial nonemotional topics for the same amount of time. Afterwards, the trauma-writing group had fewer doctor visits, greater success at work, and long term mood changes for the good. This powerful effect held up even if no one ever read the words.

Which brings us to the other half of the equation – the reader. Beyond our private diaries, if we bother to write things down, most of us want to be read, and we make decisions about how to best tell our story so that other people will want to keep going. In nonfiction, we sort through the facts we can recall using our imperfect and selective memories to pick out the juiciest ones; in fiction, we imagine the most vivid “facts” that could be true for our characters.

Even though new writers are told to write what they know, there must be questions to answer and discoveries to make or both writer and reader will nod off. One of my favorite quotes (attributed to various authors, Patricia Hampl and Margaret Atwood among them) is “I write to find out what I know.” Exactly.

Knowing the lengths that authors go to to engage in this process, I used to feel compelled to finish every book I started. Now, I am comfortable setting one aside, knowing that there is an audience out there for what the author has to say, it’s just not me. Besides, I already am going to have to stay alive until I’m 105 just to finish the books stacked up in the giant basket in my office where they collect dust and watch me disapprovingly if I’m goofing off instead of reading them. Given that pressure, I don’t have time to read a book that was meant for someone else.

Thoreau said, “It takes two to speak the truth – one to speak, and another to listen.” We each read for our own reasons – for pleasure, to soothe loneliness, to visit other places, to escape the drudgery or uncertainty of daily life, to learn, to fire our own imaginations. But how does that hold up in the age of texting and Tweeting and whatever is next?

At an Iowa writing event this summer, writing teacher and author Kyle Beachy explored whether literature is dying, as many predict. Relax, he said; it will never go away because it is irreplaceable. Its purpose is empathy – to allow us to feel what another feels, to put ourselves in another’s place to see what it would look like from there. At the end, we know something we didn’t know before.

When we read, we temporarily borrow another’s place on earth, hear their thoughts, see their challenges, feel their feelings. We get to time travel and see the past, consider the present and imagine the future. We go there to discover meaning beyond the obvious. There we see that what seems like a low point become the entryway into a whole unimagined new direction? Point of view is more than a literary device. It is the point.

Sure, the methods of distribution of what we read are changing. I’m reading, well, listening to on CD, A Moveable Feast by Hemingway about his Paris days in the 1920’s. He and his pal F. Scott Fitzgerald are described waiting for the check in the mail from each magazine story or even better, book advance, to buy their wine and pay their rent. There were no blogs, no social media, no viral posts, no shortcuts back then. It was write, sell, wait.

So we can rest easy. Nothing is dying. There will always be little girls sneaking a book after bedtime, and magical narrators to transport listeners to foreign places, and snapshots of life in a world that we missed. And if an author wants to write her ending in a way that disturbs me, I’ll have to get over it. I have all those other books waiting for me, and some to write as well.

CBH 08/10

WHIRLWIND

2010-07-15T08:15:00.000-07:00

COMING HOME - There is a magic in that little world, home; it is a mystic circle that surrounds comforts and virtues never known beyond its hallowed limits. ~ Robert Southey

It was an end-of-summer organizing day at the house. The kids were just starting 3rd and 6th grades and I’d taken the day off to whip things into shape for the new school year. We took a lunch break at Show Biz pizza, played a few games, and came back home to finish up.

Eleven-year-old Ben worked in his room and probably sneaked in some reading, while Katy and I worked in hers, attempting to contain her many collections into the smallest room in the house. Clouds loomed, no rain yet. Disk jockey Steve Dahl reported that there was some weather coming in from the west. He made fun of how alarmist meteorologists and their weather-spotters get lathered up every time the sky darkens for a few minutes. He scoffed at a report that cars were turned over near I-55 in Plainfield.

In a way, we had our own weather-spotter right in-house. Ben had for some months been scanning the skies and worrying himself sick if the conditions looked right for severe weather, especially tornados. He tried to recruit us to his vigil, but as clueless parents often do, we dismissed his concerns and assured him that there was nothing to worry about. His dad was fond of telling him, “Ben, you have a better chance of winning the lottery than getting hit by a tornado.” Our wise Ben continued to watch the skies, and to try to warn us.

The phone rang and I ran downstairs to answer it. “Carolyn, this is Pat Henry. Is David home?”

That was weird. Pat was a consultant David worked with on some of his architectural projects. Certainly he should know that he’d be at the office at 3:30p.m. Why would he call here?

“No, Pat,” I said, “I’m sure you can get him at the office.”

“Sure, okay,” he said. “I’ll do that.” And then he said nothing more.

“So, okay,” I prompted. “Good to talk to you.”

“Right,” he said, “Same here.”

A minute later I was fully absorbed in the back to school project, and for the next hour traveled between the two bedrooms, the laundry room, and the big garbage can in the garage. I was trying to fit yet another box of crucially important belongings under Katy’s bed when the phone rang again.

It was David, husband and father to us three. “Hi.” His voice sounded a little husky. “I’m okay.”

“Good,” I replied. ‘I’m glad. Me too. We’ve just about got…”

“You haven’t heard anything, have you?” he said.

“No, what?”

“I was in a tornado. In Plainfield. The building came down around us,” he said.

“Wait, what?” I started to sneak away from the kids until I could take this in. “You were what?”

“Turn on the TV. You’ll see.” He proceeded to tell me a few details. He and his partner Cliff had been meeting with a group of teachers in the school administration building when it hit. The teachers had the wit to dive under the tables. He and Cliff stood up and tried to walk out into the hallway. They were blown back into the room. David clutched the door frame until it blew away and he was down. He watched concrete blocks swirl above his head like popcorn. When it was over, they stood up to find the building around their knees. They looked straight up to see the sky filled with lightning and pouring rain.

First, they helped the teachers to safety to wait for help for their broken bones, then stopped to attend a man also waiting for emergency help. They gradually realized that the reason he wasn’t moving was that he was impaled on a plank of wood. He survived.

Once they reached the periphery, they looked back to see the high school on fire, missing its roof, a disaster scene. The building they’d been in was the pile of rubble over there. Cliff’s car sat atop a pile of cars at the edge of the lot, its emergency flashers blinking on and off.

With no car, no phone service and loved ones to check on – Cliff’s son was supposed to be at the town pool– they headed to Cliff’s father’s office on a nearby busy street. His dad, the town doctor, knew nothing since his office windows faced away from the route of the storm. He took off for the hospital for emergency duty that would last into the night. Several phone calls later, Cliff located his son, and David made the call to me.

“Should I come and get you?” I asked.

“You’d never get near here. Cliff’s going to borrow a car. He’ll drop me off.”

You know how kids are with their radar for trouble. While I was trying to play it cool and not alarm them, Ben and Katy hovered to hear the whole story. I hung up and chose my words.

“Okay,” I said. “Dad’s fine, but he and Cliff were in a tornado. In Plainfield. He’ll be here.”

I turned off the radio while Steve Dahl apologized for his earlier dismissal as reports of the severe damage and loss of life – 29 in total we eventually learned, 3 at the school complex – came in. We switched to TV but there wasn’t much to see yet, and we already knew the most important thing – David was coming home.

I tried to reinstate normalcy in the house. We resumed our project, and ran back to the TV when there was a new report. Each of us began to take in the enormity of it – this could have been the worst day of our lives, and it wasn’t. I began to formulate my apology to Ben who tried to tell us that this might happen. To his credit, he never demanded it.

Katy spotted David first. “Dad’s coming up the walk and he looks terrible!”

Sure, he was covered with dust, his glasses were wrecked, his face was cut, but here he came. I had to disagree. He looked pretty good to me.

A whirlwind of another kind followed. After telling the story and answering all our questions, he gobbled a sandwich, and went to Lenscrafters where they beat their new-glasses-in-one-hour promise, and he could see again. I went along when he headed for Plainfield and Joliet to help figure out how to start a school year with 1200 students and no building.

The next night was our 20th anniversary. We spent it at an emergency school board meeting, which was more romantic than it sounds. In the past 20 years, much has changed – the kids are on their own, years of new events have layered over the memory of the tornado. But when he shows up every night, or calls me during the day, there is something that still remains of that day, a whiff of gratitude, and recognition of what might have been.

CBY 07/10

GRIEF AND RELIEF

2010-06-15T11:18:00.000-07:00

RELIEF - Can I see another's woe, and not be in sorrow, too? Can I see another's grief, and not seek for kind relief? ~ William Blake

My mother called me, incensed. She’d just found the receipt from her doctor’s visit a week before. Uh oh. How did I let that fall into her hands?
“Do you know what that doctor wrote down?” she demanded.

Yes, I did know. I had taken her in for an opinion on her increasing forgetfulness.

“Dementia!” she sputtered. “How could he say that?”

I summoned my reassuring reasonable self. “Mom, remember we went in to talk to him about your memory?”

“We did?”

“Yes. We discussed it,” I said. “That’s just medical language for that conversation.”

“Well, what did he say?” she wanted to know.

“That your memory isn’t what it used to be,” I said, “But we knew that.”

She chuckled, “I guess.”

She didn’t ask the next question and I didn’t answer it. Where would this lead us, and when?

Like many others, just you reach the point when your kids are launching their own lives, and you think that your life is about to become your own again, your parent begins to need you in a whole new way. As she teetered on the precipice of neediness and debilitation, you realize that it threatens to take you down too. Your narrative changes. The one about the largely joyful journey toward your kids’ independence is replaced by the one about the descent into your parent’s encroaching and eventually total dependence.

The best thing to say about this experience is that it gives you the smallest peek into what she must be going through. The worst thing is that it won’t go away until she dies. The dance between grief and relief has begun.

At first, I deny. I explain away the crumpled fenders, forgotten appointments, inability to work the remote control. I tease her, “Good thing your head is attached or you’d lose it, huh Mom,” when I really want to scream, “We talked about this two hours ago – how on earth could you forget?”

After the totaled car, the terrified call that a hallucination of a boy is in the corner, the forgotten pan on the stove that led to the condo building being evacuated, I couldn’t deny anymore.

That’s when the first unexpected wave of relief arrived. Once I used my energy to face reality instead of run from it, I gave up my dreams of someday getting to say, “Yep, she’s 94 and sharp as a tack.” Instead it became, “Well, she’s 79 and her memory is a problem, but she still knows me, so that’s something.”

I developed a plan. I scheduled appointments for us to visit assisted living facilities which she forgot to get dressed for and then declined to attend. I went alone and chose the one that had daily current events discussions over the one that had residents paste construction paper into mosaics.

Then I tried to scale the mountain of her resistance, “I’m perfectly fine. I don’t see why I can’t just stay in my condo.” I got nowhere. Then she fell again and the doctor forbid her to return home without 24 hour supervision. Reality trumps desire.

I picked the nicest corner room overlooking a pond, and moved her in, staying over the first night to ease any confusion. When I walked out the next morning into a gorgeous fall day, I realized that from now on there would be people looking over her all day and all night. This day that I had dreaded for so long brought another surprising wave of relief.

Weeks later, after I had cleared out her condo and put it on the market, I drove her over there, wondering if the sting of her forced departure had been soothed by her new safe surroundings. She looked at the building without recognition. She wasn’t pining for her old independent life because she couldn’t remember it. More relief.

As her awareness of her plight faded, other ties with her past and expectations for the future fell away, and she lived more and more in the moment. We regularly perused the scrapbook my daughter made for her. One day, she no longer recognized the picture of Bob, the love of her life who died when they were 34.

“Who’s this?” she asked.

“That’s Bob, your husband, my father,” I said.

“Really,” she said. She took a closer look, bewildered. How could you forget your own husband?

Rather than continue my campaign to get her to remember, I could let each visit focus on right now – how the sunlight looked on the trees in the courtyard, how the breeze stirred them. By now, she was in the memory unit of a nursing home, which became a godsend. A multi-cultural team of caregivers somehow managed to see through the fog of her dementia and find the bright, funny, kind person she had always been. Thanks to them, there was lots of laughter still to come. Who knew to expect that?

As she lost language, we no longer struggled to get ideas across to each other but settled for sharing the moment. Every couple of weeks the hospice social worker left me a message like this: “We had a wonderful visit today. I held her hand and we listened to music. She watched me with those beautiful green eyes and I felt that she was really with me.”

I learned to do that myself and be satisfied. This new way saw us through to the end. My daughter and I were present, my son on the phone. We had music, and the hospice nurse whispered a message into her ear. “Go Jessie, and dance with Bob.”

Surprised, I found myself smiling. What a thought. We held her hands and soon she did, peacefully.

Almost right away, I began to regain memories of happier times and had an easy time recalling her backbone, her independent streak, how we’d collapse in laughter at the same oddball occurrences. It was as if I could finally detach from her ten-year decline and reclaim the whole of her. Again, the dreaded worst happened and comfort appeared. If only I’d known that from the start.

CBH 06/10

DANGEROUS ROMANCE

2010-05-15T13:46:00.000-07:00

NARROW ESCAPES - Wherever there is danger, there lurks opportunity; whenever there is opportunity, there lurks danger. The two are inseparable. They go together. ~ Earl Nightingale

Have you ever been seduced by a house, or in the case of this tale, a townhouse? When I fell in love with it, it didn’t even exist. It’s the way a lot of romances begin, with a vision of something that isn’t really there.

It was shingle-style, with stone foundation and two porches, one screened in. It was roomy for a townhouse, meaning I wouldn’t have had to get rid of any of my lifetime accumulation of furniture I’m apparently not done with yet. The English basement even had room for the pool table and the juke box.

The sales team had it conjured on a full-wall video mural depicting the full sweep of the new neighborhood, to be constructed on the site of a recently leveled downtrodden apartment development. The sales office stood on an adjacent property, accessible via a circuitous route involving three left turns.

As sales teams should be, this group was bursting with predictions - the units would be snapped up in a flash, several people had already put down deposits, the building would commence in accordance with the speed of the closings. It would start with the first row of townhouses and the first condo building, close to the elegant entrance, so new residents would not have to drive through a construction zone while the rest were completed. The landscaping would be done right away, not to worry.

I went home clutching gorgeous brochures and memories of the quality cabinet and hardware options. I could just imagine the sunlight streaming in through the bay window in the breakfast area. It reminded me of the house in the movie with Diane Keaton I can never remember the name of where Jack Nicholson recovers from a heart attack or something at her fantastic seaside house. (Remember? He is dating her nubile young daughter which pretty much turns your stomach so imagine how the Diane Keaton character must have felt, but came around to falling in love with her [Diane] instead.) Something’s Gotta Give, that’s it.

See? That’s where the fantasy took over. I floated through the next few days, researching the developer, visiting their other properties, imagining the cleansing process of a move for the first time in 15 years, and dreaming of my new life with no landscaping bills.

My husband sobered up first - why would we want to live in a construction site? The floor plan was awkward and the entryway a disaster - come in the front door and three feet later you have to climb up or down to get to the living space. How would his dad in his wheelchair ever visit?

Oh, good point. Is there room for an elevator, we asked the bright sales lady. Well yes, she stammered, if you give up a chunk of the kitchen, and a bedroom, and the bar in the basement.

Hmm. The dream started to fade. Also influential, the consideration of whether to commit before selling our current house, which wasn’t hard to decide since we’d once owned two houses for a spell and swore to learn from our mistake. The brakes engaged. We told them no the next time they called, crushing their dreams, and mine.

I used to drive by sometimes, watching the project begin. True to their word, they started with the two buildings they’d promised, and the gate looked great. The recession was starting to show itself though and I noticed that the newspaper ads that used to feature snob appeal of living in the village, now took on a budget tinge - townhouses for only $700,000, condos in the $300,000s. Wait, weren’t they vastly more expensive than that when we looked; where were those brochures?

The recession won, the salesladies are long gone, their sales office still perched above a vast empty parking lot. There is a leaning chain link fence around the whole property with No Trespassing signs every six feet. Giant puddles collect in the unpaved streets. Piles of building materials dot the property, stacks of concrete curbs, concrete blocks, and stones. Lengths of giant sewer pipe rest against rolling hills of dirt with new grass poking through straw. A mountain of landscaping boulders sits near the entrance. A lone trash container sits imprisoned behind the fence.

It reminds me of Pompeii, life frozen in the moment of disaster. But now life is taking over again - the grass, dozens of birds chirp crazily because it’s finally spring. A neighbor walks her dog through the one paved street that leads from the sales office to the gate. The two buildings sit, stickers on each window, paused just before happy people were to move into their new lives.

Except for the first townhouse of the four. It’s the unit we picked out - for best sunlight both morning and evening, best view of the treed neighborhood behind, in view of the community gazebo. In that unit, the stickers are off the windows, Venetian blinds and shutters are up, and the porch light is on. Two cars sit out back alongside a basketball hoop. An urn holds flowers. Someone is living in our unit, carrying on life in the middle, well really at the edge of, the stalled construction site. They have a very short ride until they are out on the street driving past the construction sign no one ever took down that promises access to the office and exciting deals 11-6 every day.

Narrow escape? Yes, except for one family who may feel foolish, or unlucky, or philosophical, depending on who and how they are. Give them credit for pulling the trigger on their new life, even if it didn’t turn out quite as they expected. A little part of me still longs for the new start, the sun in the morning and all that. It looks cozy in there in the rain, a good place to read a book. Looking too closely feels a little dangerous, like looking back at an old boyfriend and wondering, even when you know better. Thank goodness you snapped out of it, but the dream lingers, of how things might have been.

CBH 05/10

WHAT TO LEAVE BEHIND

2010-04-15T09:06:00.000-07:00

TURNING POINTS: The turning point in the process of growing up is when you discover the core of strength within you that survives all hurt. ~Max Lerner

There I was, two years old, crazy about my father (I’m told, because of course I can’t remember), and he dies. Over the years in waves that come years and sometimes decades apart, I launch into projects in an effort to get to know him and figure out which parts of me are linked to him. As a child who can’t remember her parent, I am a walking advertisement for ethical wills.

Here’s what I’ve learned about him: he was a great guy, more a poet than a salesman (he worked for a book publisher), talented musician who had his own band in high school, who fell hard for my mother when they met at a Christmas party and found a way to send her roses while she visited her family in the North Carolina mountains the next week. His boss told me 50 years after his death that he might well have become president of the company and I believed him since he still had my dad’s picture on his office wall. I read the stack of condolence letters from colleagues and clients that poured in after his death, describing his intelligence and good will. I read narratives his sisters wrote about their growing up in Chicago. I memorized the photos of my early life. Since he took most of them, he rarely appears, which allows me to see through his eyes, in a way.

I can glean a good deal about him from all this, but it’s a poor substutute. If only I could hear directly from him, I’ve always thought, had something in his own hand, to me.

If only he had heard about ethical wills, an awkward name for the very thing I longed for. Instead of a regular will that hands down property and financial assets, an ethical will hands down beliefs, values, stories, and hopes, whatever is important to leave behind.

I thought I invented them myself when I was a young mother and had to leave my two children to take a three week trip to Europe with my husband. I say “had to” because even though I knew intellectually that this trip was a great opportunity – my husband was president of his service club and was being sent to the international convention – I could not bear the idea of leaving the kids. To be honest, I could not bear the idea of something happening to me and never coming back to the kids. I knew they could handle three weeks without me, but a lifetime?

To soothe my anguish, I sat down to write them a letter about all the things I needed them to know if I wasn’t around to tell them myself – about me, my hopes for their futures, about how to meet challenges, what they meant to me. I left the letter at home just in case.

Of course I came back in one piece, having had stimulating and moving experiences on the trip. I can still see the faces of the varied group that traveled to Dachau one day to take in the worst of humankind. I can hear the music in a Hungarian restaurant in Munich where we partied with another international group, and the earnest and overly optimistic declarations that our organization would eradicate polio worldwide in ten years. But the only way I could get myself to leave home and have these experiences was to leave myself behind on those pages.

It turns out I wasn’t alone in my impulse. When I eventually tripped over the work of Barry Baines, a Minneapolis-area doctor involved in end-of-life care, I learned that ethical wills had a name and a 3,000 year history. The first phrase in Barry’s book Ethical Wills is, “At turning points in our lives….” When we know we are up against a life-changing experience – when we walk down the aisle, or the baby is born – we take stock. When we learn of our coming demise as Barry’s patients do, we know that our time to share is limited. For me, faced with the imagined re-creation of my own childhood loss in the lives of my children, it became the right time to put down my thoughts and feelings on paper.

What to include? The things you believe in, experiences you have learned from, advice you can give, apologies and forgiveness, things you wish you’d known, family stories, memories you cherish, hopes for your loved ones, requests about how you hope to be remembered, and thanks you want to offer can all come up. Once you start, it writes itself.

All you need to know is who you are writing to, and why. This is not a place to settle scores or issue blame or instill guilt. This is a place to share your spirit so it can live on in your loved ones. You can write one document to everyone, or personalize a letter to each loved one.

In the old days, the ethical will would be attached to the standard will to be read after death. Now we can choose when and whether to share it while we are still here, in writing, orally, on video, your choice. It is recommended that even if you use new media, you produce a paper copy too that will live on after the technology goes obsolete.

As the walking advertisement for ethical wills and also briefly the imagined inventor, let me offer some final selling points and invite you to consider writing one yourself. In the end, values are of greater importance than valuables. Writing one takes the accidental legacy you would leave if anyone bothered to remember, say, your greatest moment, which they might not know because you never told them, and turns it into a lasting legacy.

The benefits include:

The process may leave you knowing more about yourself and what you hold dear.
Since we don’t sit around the fire and share stories much anymore, being too busy watching reality TV shows, it gives you a chance to direct your loved ones’ attention to more important matters.
In case your messages to your children are often delivered as corrections or criticism, sometimes at the top of your lungs, it offers a way to share the love and concern that underlie all of that in a calm and loving voice.
You get to say how you would like to be remembered, you control freak you.
It serves as a refresher course in what is most important to you, so you can double-check to see if you are living your 168 hours each week in accordance.

I relaxed as soon as I wrote mine. When it needs revising, I do so, but if I got hit by the cosmic bus tomorrow, I know I’ve had my say.

For further tips, see http://www.ethicalwill.com/.

CBH 04/10