And then there were 3...

New blog site

2015-10-13T13:45:00.000-07:00

Please visit my new website!

http://karenrettich.wix.com/karenr

On the Occasion of Your Twelfth Birthday:

2014-11-22T16:37:00.000-08:00

On the Occasion of Your Twelfth Birthday:

A letter to my son

Let me first say what all adults say, even though it is rhetorical and slightly ridiculous; “I cannot believe how big you are getting!”

Yes we all say things like that because one day you are a blip on the ultrasound screen and the next you are asking for the keys to the car, which thankfully we have not yet reached that point yet. We are amazed at how quickly you children grow and seem astounded by your progress. We should be more surprised if you didn’t grow or perhaps shrunk but instead we marvel at your age, your size, the changing squeak in your voice. Forgive us and indulge us, sometimes it is all a bit to take in.

As I reflect on the day you were born I would like to state for the record that you took your sweet time. Your desire to not leave where you were comfortable seems to have stayed with you. I am sure if we had realized how much you love video games we could have coaxed you out sooner with the sound of X-Box blipping and bleeping but who knew? And I suppose I should take some of the blame, if I had paid attention in that class I might have learned something about giving birth but as it was your dad was too busy commentating his way through his distress and I am sure by now you know him well enough to know taking a class with him probably isn’t the best idea.

I remember holding you after you were born and crying when I realized you were all mine and the responsibility knocked me flat, that and a hormone surge that could have lit up New York City. I remember your new baby smell and I remember when that went away and was replaced by new baby poop smell. But it was all okay because you were sweet and loveable and mine.

You did not come with a manual, neither did your siblings, but in your case it has been hit or miss. You were a brave soul to be born first. Your dad and I have made a few mistakes along the way. We probably shouldn’t have listened when we were told “Baby Mozart” was good for your brain. I am pretty sure that advice was wrong. I should have fed you more vegetables and fewer chicken nuggets. I could apologize for these things and many more. Like the day you fell down the stairs, or the day I yelled at you for hiding in the closet eating cat food because I thought someone had come into our house and abducted you while I was in the bathroom. Since you were only a year old I probably should have toned down the yelling a bit but fear can make a person lose sight of reality. Or the afternoon I spanked you for biting me. The sight of the blood dripping from my thumb rendering me temporarily insane, but I was sorry even as I placed the steri strips on my wound.

You were “a rascal” as your grandmother called you. You ran without stopping, you talked without taking a breath. You knocked down blocks and chased the cat. But in all that and even with parents who had no manual, you have continued to grow.

You have scraped your knees and fought with your brother. You have exhausted us and worried us. You have made us proud and brought us joy. I am not sure what you will remember from your childhood. Our memories will never quite match up. You will remember your life as a child, I will remember it as an adult. I will remember holding your hand and reading you books. I will remember when I yelled or had to punish you. I will remember when I slept on your floor when you were sick and held the “throw up bucket” for you. I will remember my tears of joy watching you in your first play. I will remember hugging you when you were hurt because someone said something that made you feel bad and telling you to be the bigger person, even though I wanted to punch the little bugger myself.

What will you remember? I am not sure but I hope you remember that I slept on your floor and wiped away your tears. I am hoping you won’t remember the times when I flailed my arms and yelled, “Are you kidding me!?” To be honest boys are a mystery to me. Your behavior at times perplexes me. I am not sure why you would bring a frog into the house to see if he could climb the stairs. Or why you would let the tub overflow to see where the water would go. Or why you thought the Little People could be flushed down the toilet and appear somewhere else. It all remains a mystery. And as you get older (as you are bound to do) the mysteries continue, like why you think standing in the bathroom while the shower is running constitutes a shower. Or why you think cleaning the bathroom doesn’t mean cleaning the toilet.

So as your life is truly just beginning and mine is reaching its half-way point ( yes I could very well live to be 90 so please be prepared), I am painfully aware of how few years we will actually spend living together but joyfully aware of what lies ahead, where you can go and what you can do. My hope is you will go and you will do. That you will take the opportunities that come your way. I hope you will forgive us for our mistakes and realize all of what we have done and will continue to do is because we love you. Just as I don’t understand you I know you don’t always understand us. Why we limit your video game time or make you fold your laundry. Why you have to do the dishes or clean the bathroom. Or why I stand behind you whispering, “say thank you” . Someday it may not all seem so mysterious. Then again you and your siblings may have a good laugh at my expense as you sit around having a beer and imitating me…”Remember when mom used to (fill in the blank).” That is okay; just remember what goes around…

And when I am old and my face is lined with deep creases, you may come to realize many are because of you. I wouldn’t change a single one. Each wrinkle, every crease tells our story. My life is happy because I am a mom. My life is complete because I am your mom.

Happy Birthday

Never Give Up

2014-05-12T12:52:00.002-07:00

Most mornings when I am awake early enough I pile our 108 pound puppy into the truck and we head off to the woods for a trail run. Now that the weather is warming up and the sun is up nice and early this is not a difficult task. At least getting there is not difficult, sometimes the actual run is a bit of a challenge.

Our Ellie is not much of a runner. Of course she is hauling a large load and has a good deal of fur so some mornings it is probably down right uncomfortable. But she has a terrible short term memory so when I lace up my sneakers she has forgotten yesterday's run and she starts to get so excited she drools and nudges me to get me moving faster. She pants all the way to the park. We get there and she leaps from the car, paws flailing. She runs to the nearest tree and takes a long sniff, tail wagging. Moves on to another tree, tail wagging, sniff sniff. She runs all out for about a mile or so then she loses steam. Unfortunately for her I spend the first mile cussing myself out for getting up so early and complaining to no one in particular because, well there is no one there to listen, about how out of shape I am until mile two when the adrenalin kicks in and then I am good for a couple more miles.

And she's off!

Poor dog. She forgets this. After her mile she slows down and sometimes stops altogether and looks at me with those big,beautiful, sad eyes just dripping with a longing you can almost feel in your soul. Mostly it is a longing for food and water, which she doesn't get until we are done, something else I think she doesn't remember.

Each time we run she chases whatever wild life makes enough noise or is close enough for her to catch their scent. Sometimes it is some unsuspecting squirrel and sometimes it is a deer and most times it is at least two deer we come across as they quietly nibble on grass, enjoying the serenity of an early morning feast. Which Ellie rudely interrupts by the thunderous roar of her paws hitting the ground. Of course my sweet dog cannot catch deer. She tries and sometimes I lose sight of her because she is focused and determined and lost in the woods. Eventually, though she realizes the futility of her chase and emerges from behind a stone wall or some bushes and trots along side me until something else catches her attention.

   I love that about her. I love the tenacity she shows each time she takes off after the deer. They are so much faster than she is. I am sure if she ever got close enough and one kicked her there would be serious damage but she never gets close enough. They bound gracefully over the stones walls and hop through the vegetation like ballerinas performing a well rehearsed routine. And Ellie, well she just charges. She doesn't seem to recall from the previous morning that she wasn't able to catch that deer. It doesn't even faze her.   Somewhere in her wiring she is told to chase and she goes.
But even better is her ability to just move on when it doesn't work out. She sidles up to me with this attitude of "oh well, I wasn't that interested anyway."

   That is a fabulous attribute. Being able to go after something day after day, losing day after day and yet shaking off the disappointment to try another day. There are many famous people who have succeeded even when faced with rejection and failure, over and over again. J.K Rowling was rejected by 12 publishers. Stephen King's first novel, "Carrie", sound familiar? Yes it was rejected 30 times. He even threw it away and his wife pulled it from the trash and encouraged him to try again.

    Albert Einstein was considered mentally handicapped by his parents and teachers in his early life because he didn't speak until he was four and didn't read until he was seven. Bet they felt a little handicapped when he won the Nobel Prize. Walt Disney was fired by a news editor because he lacked imagination and his first animation company went bankrupt. http://getbusylivingblog.com/famous-people-who-found-success-despite-failures/

   Martin Luther King got a C in public speaking.   Do we even know who that professor was?

   There have been many things I have given up on because I thought they were too difficult or simply because I didn't think I had what was required to succeed. Piano, gymnastics, flute; the list goes on. Even college. Although eventually I tried that and it worked out just fine.

    A few days ago I was taking a walk with my oldest and he told me math is too hard for him. I get it. To be honest math is one thing I gave up on years ago. I would rather stick a sharp object beneath my fingernails then take another math course, ever. But this is not something I wanted to share with my 11 year old. At this point he has a lot of math ahead of him. And of course I don't want him to give up on things the way I did. If he gives up on math he may just give up on anything that is a challenge.

   So I simply said, "Math is not hard," ( author's note...it is okay to lie to your children when it is in their best interest.)    " Really nothing is hard unless you tell yourself it is. Then once you have done that you may as well pack it in. It is all about your mind set. Set your mind on accomplishing something and you will, eventually. Some things just take more effort than others." I then patted myself on the back because I thought that was rather profound. My son ,however, said ," Nah, it's just too hard."

   I switched tactics and told him about Ellie's deer chasing, how she keeps trying without giving up. I am not sure how much of that sunk in because he smiled and said,"She's funny."

   So he isn't wired like our tenacious dog.   Most humans aren't. It takes practice and determination just to become determined. Dogs just do, which works great for them. Ellie will keep trying to catch the deer. I am doubtful she ever will. I am hopeful she won't. I am not sure what either one of us would do if she managed to catch one. And my son will find his way through math. I will keep repeating the same mantra to him until it sinks in, until he hears it in his sleep, until he is saying it himself without even realizing he is saying it. And then, hopefully, he will be a little like Ellie, wired for success and ignoring failure.

And she's done!

Six Degrees of Seperation...and Shakespeare

2014-02-09T13:35:00.002-08:00

   I find it fascinating to see where people have come from. I don't mean geographically, although that can certainly be interesting but where people descend from or more to the point, who they descend from. Because the reality is we all are here because two people fell in love, were betrothed, or were arranged to marry before they were potty trained. After watching a few episodes of "Who Do You Think You Are?" I was hooked on how far back genealogy could go. After seeing Cindy Crawford get traced all the way back to Charlamagne it was just too much for my curiosity to sit idle and just wonder. So I hopped onto a free trial of Ancestry.com.

It wasn't as easy as they like to portray, at least not for the slightly attention deficit, energy depleted mothers of the world. Or just me. The little "leaf" didn't always pop up and sometimes when it did it gave me information on other people because they had a name similar to one of my people. I know on my mother's side that her grandfather came from Sweden in the 1890's and settled in Chicago, because isn't that where all the Swedes settled? He had several siblings he left behind so I am pretty sure I have some distant relatives just waiting to welcome me to Sweden. I wouldn't mind finding them. My great-grandmother, his wife, on the other hand is a mystery to me. She met and married my great-grandfather in Chicago and followed him to New Britain when he finished seminary. My mother's mother's people I know nothing about and there were no leafs to help me out.

So I moved on to my father's side. I managed to find an ancestor of my grandmother's, a Stephen Blazier who was a carpenter living in Georgia in the mid 1800's. But I lost the trail from there. I was kind of excited I got that far since my grandmother was never one to talk much. Most of my conversations with her were one-sided. I talked, she listened. I like to talk and she was a good listener so it worked out.

   A few months ago one of my cousins on my father's side sent me an email inviting me to view her family tree on Ancestry.com. I looked at the page she had sent and she had not gotten past our mutual grandmother. So I emailed her and told her about my Georgia find, feeling quite proud of myself until she emailed back that I needed to click on individuals to go back farther and she had traced us all the way back to the 1300's in England on our grandmother's side.

I was so excited I could hardly sit still.   I was so impressed she had managed to trace one line of our family so far back. She told me it had helped that she had been sick in bed for a couple days because honestly I think you need to devote yourself and hours to just reading hand written censuses until your eyes water and blurred vision feels like the new normal.

She also mentioned that she traced our grandmother's side back to a woman named Agnes Webb who appeared to be an aunt to William Shakespeare.

   William Shakespeare! To be or not didn't even matter, just the idea that we had some watered down relation to the Bard was enough to make me want to order new stationary with the Shakespeare crest.

    So I started clicking away on individuals. If we begin with my grandmother who's maiden name was Blazier, her father George was the son of Stephen and Anne( Delevan) Blazier. Stephen was the son of Stephen and Thuressa (Wilson) Blazier. Which makes them my three-times great-grandparents. Still with me?

   Then we find Philip Blazer( not a spelling error, the spelling of the name changes.) Phillip(1773-1854) married Ann Lewis and this is where the fun begins. Bear with me! Now if we follow Ann's line, which would be my four times great-grandmother, we find that her line began in England. Ann was the daughter of Jacob Lewis and Catherine (Freeman) Lewis, who it would appear might have died either while giving birth to Ann or shortly thereafter as her death is documented in 1776 the same year Ann was born.

    Jacob (father of Ann and my five times great-grandfather) was the son of Thomas Lewis(1715-1763), who was born in New Jersey, in Colonial America and Ann Dandridge(1715-1808), also born in New Jersey but her older siblings were born in England. Ann Dandridge ( who if I am doing this correctly would be my six times great-grandmother) was the daughter of John Dandridge ( 1655-1731) and Bridget Dugdale. Both resided in Oxford,Oxfordshire,England until their immigration to America. They are my seven time great-grandparents. From here we follow the Dandridge line.

And here is where it would help if either I or my cousin was someone famous then the producers of "Who Do You Think You Are?" could sweep in and fly us off to England where we could perhaps unravel the mystery of why John and Bridget immigrated to America. But whatever their reasons if we still keep going we find William Dandridge(1613-1638) married Ann Boiling.( Not Ann Boleyn because that would be another crest of arms and I would be claiming rights to the throne or perhaps I would just keep that to myself after all.) This makes them my eight times great-grandparents. William was the son of Sir B. Dandridge (1580-1604) and Elizabeth Webb, my nine times great-grandparents.

    Still with me? Hang in there the end is close!

Now we follow the Webb line. Elizabeth was the daughter of Richard Webb and Agnes Webb, my 10 times great-grandparents. Now Agnes seems to have been a Webb prior to marrying Richard(most likely they were cousins) so when we follow her line of Webbs we see that Agnes was the daughter of Sir Henry A Webb (1510-1544) and Grace Arden(1514-1539). These folks are my 11 times great-grandparents. Sir Henry had one brother and four sisters. His sister, Abigail, married Richard Shakespeare. Which would make Richard my "uncle" 12 times removed or perhaps many ore times removed, at this point I would need professional help. They had a son named John , who I suppose would be a cousin 13 times removed. John Shakespeare, who if I am following my own line correctly becomes a cousin 14 times removed, married Mary Arden and they had a son named William. TA-DA!

   Confused? Yes so am I. I am still not sure I am calculating this perfectly well. I will be seeing my cousin in March and I am hoping we might find some time to view the lineage. What is remarkable as I was researching all the work my cousin did, was the realization that last names start to appear more frequently the farther you go back. Meaning there was inter-marrying of cousins. While I was trying to figure out if Sir Henry and Grace Arden were indeed my 12 times great-grandparents I came across several articles explaining lineage and ancestry. The website Olive Tree Genealogy was very helpful.   The article linked here is what made me take a closer look at the last names. It explains that if we just doubled our great-grandparents back 10 generations we would have potentially 1024 ancestors and if followed all the way back to Charlamagne it would be an astounding 281 trillion, which is impossible. http://www.olivetreegenealogy.com/misc/ancestors.shtml

   I think it is fascinating where we come from. And each great-grandparent comes with siblings who marry and have children. And this is only tracing back my grandmother on my father's side. My father's dad, it appears had his beginnings in Germany. While I was researching all of this my husband peered over my shoulder and saw that my great-grandfather had married Lucy Ann Totten. "We have Tottens!" He exclaimed. I just nodded and made a mental note to add that the growing list of things I probably should have found out prior to saying "I do." But the reality is he and I could be cousins several times removed; several, several times removed. He is also competitive, which I did know ahead of time and wants it to be stated that our children also descend from a very famous radish farmer from Germany, which is why he loves to garden.

So think of the possibility this presents. The world feels smaller with all the technology we have. We can skype, facetime, instant message.   But the truth is the world has always been small. In some way we are related to more people than just the cousins on our mom's side or the crazy uncle on our dad's side. We are all a tribe. Perhaps that is why when we find someone who becomes a great friend there is more to it than just two people who have stuff in common. We could have DNA in common!

As I went back through our family history, Shakespeare notwithstanding, and the reason I gave the breakdown of all their names and dates was to give a visual for the people who came before me. The people who contributed to my love of writing, reading. Perhaps that is why I have an unyielding desire to see England. Or maybe that is why I love tea with cream and sugar. Or maybe it has nothing to do with it because it is so watered down. But I do believe I am the result of all those who came before me. The people who made all the right choices that brought me to this day. Because you see if John and Bridget Dandridge did not leave Oxfordshire, England then their daughter Ann would not have married Thomas Lewis and my story would not have begun. Of course the same could be said for my mother's grandfather who came to America from Sweden. I have not been able to follow his line back...yet. But I am feeling a cold coming on...

Me and my sister with our grandmother,Helen Blazier Drake, our link to Shakespeare.

What I Learned from Not Writing 50,000 words in a month

2014-01-03T12:28:00.000-08:00

A friend inquired recently how I did participating in National Write a Novel in a Month (otherwise known as NANOWRIMO). She asked if I completed my novel and I had to reply "no". I told her I wrote 14,000 words and was still writing and she offered her kind support. 14,000 words is better than no words , which is what I accomplished the previous two years that I signed up. And it is more than I have written since I was in high school. In high school I started my first novel between junior and senior year. Over the summer before my senior year I spent each summer night hunched over my grandfather's old electric typewriter banging on the keys, going through tons of white-out;my Sony Walkman playing Micheal Jackson, because he was still kind of cool then and not quite as weird and well, white. I started writing Chapter One and completed 60 pages single spaced. I was very proud of myself. I still have that manuscript. It is a little tough to read now since it would appear that I was drowning in a sea of V.C. Andrews novels at the time and could possibly have become her ghost writer. It is drippy and sappy and harsh but we all have to start somewhere.

    In my senior year I took a creative writing class. My teacher, Mrs.C., was slightly eccentric, enthusiastic and carried her own writing filled notebooks around with her. It was her best advice to always keep something to write with close at hand. I have more notebooks than I care to admit to. Pretty journals and regular style notebooks, leather bound or paper bound. Not all of them filled but mostly filled or on there way to being filled and some just contain lists of things to do. I even love to write lists.

    A few weeks into the class I approached her and asked if she would consider reading something I had written. She smiled and exclaimed ,"Of course." Then I dropped the 60 pages on her desk with a thud and her smile faded, only slightly. She regained her composure and asked what I had written. I explained I had spent the summer beginning a novel, half expecting her to laugh at me, but she didn't. She took my 60 pages and tucked them into her bag and returned them to me the next day, complete with corrections and praise in red ink on every page. She also wrote a note I have kept to this day, encouraging me to clean it up and submit it to a publisher. I never did because shortly after that amazing confidence boosting note came a visit with my guidance counselor who, in one fell swoop undid all of the wonderful things Mrs.C had done. She cut me off at the knees with a curt reminder that my grades weren't that great and getting into a college that offered journalism was a long shot. She also wrote that down for me so I wouldn't forget, but I managed to lose that piece of paper.

    I resented that guidance counselor for many years but as I have gotten older I have realized that along the way we meet people who are in the right profession and then there are those who are not. Perhaps she wasn't where she wanted to be. Perhaps her day had been terrible and listening to one more high school kid talk about what they wanted to do was just that proverbial straw on an imaginary camel's back. When it comes down to it, although it is nice to be lifted up and encouraged it is not up to anyone else to create a path for you. The only thing that kept me from doing what I wanted was allowing my mind to keep replaying that moment over and over again, a constant drone playing in my subconscious.

   It became second nature to talk myself out of writing anything. It became an internal dialogue that played over and over. Negative thoughts breed negative behavior, perhaps not directly your own but you bring that negativity into your being and it settles around you, like dust on Pig-Pen. Negative thoughts have been proven to have an impact on our over all emotional well-being and also our physical well-being. We can talk ourselves into being sick as easily as we can talk ourselves into being a failure. When we learn to talk to ourselves in a positive light, to let the good shine through and push the negativity aside we find ourselves with more energy, emotionally upbeat and more fun to be around. This becomes a wonderful cycle. The more you feel confident, the more you exude that confidence and the more people will want to be in your presence. When we allow ourselves to fall into negative thinking, when we give credence to things perhaps someone else said to us it drags us down and begins a cycle of bad feelings, physical pain, even depression.

When I was little I had a record player in my room. Each night I played "A Boy Named Charlie Brown." If you left the arm off the record player the record would just keep repeating. Side one was the best part of the story. Charlie Brown enters a spelling contest and he wins. His friends carry him home and sing his praises. I never listened to side two. On side two Charlie Brown goes off to the city for the National Spelling Bee and loses, spelling beagle wrong. Oh the irony and the negativity. He comes home alone and no one meets him at the bus, no one to greet him and tell him he did his best. I hated that side. It was enough to make me cry, it made me feel lonely and cold. So it was side one, over and over and over. I could recite it for you, if you wish.

Just like Charlie Brown couldn't blame losing his spelling bee on anyone else, I certainly cannot blame the fact that I have not yet written the great American novel on an adult from my past. I can say that I allowed that one negative encounter to hold me in a place that said," you probably can't do it so why try?" Of course there are those who can be told they can't accomplish something and run right out to prove someone wrong. I wasn't that person. I was more like silly putty. You could write something down and press me into it and it would stick.

It was after I became a mom and I heard myself saying over and over to my small children," don't say can't , you can do anything you want, just try." that I started to wipe away those long engrained thoughts for myself. A conversation I had with my friend and fellow blogger, America's Next Top Mommy, http://americasnexttopmommy.blogspot.com/, brought me to understand that writing wasn't about writing what someone else may want to read, writing was about doing something I loved. Putting words together, creating an atmosphere, making sense of my own world. She was the one who encouraged me to start a blog, something at the time I thought was kind of silly and wouldn't be worth it in the long run. I have been wrong before. And once I stopped trying to write to please others and once I changed my inner mantra from "I'm not that good at writing." to "Who cares if I'm not good at it, I love it!" the more I wrote and the more I just enjoyed the process.

    While I was trying in November to crank out that great American novel I received some of the best advice from one former high school friend, who is a published author, he wrote on my Facebook page
"Just get it all out, make a mess, don't worry about page 10 lining up with page 96. Just put it on the page. Then you go back and get to work." It was perfect. It is easy to make a mess. It is easy to let the words flow even when they don't make sense. All this time I really thought I needed to start at Chapter One and work my way through. So I just wrote whatever moved me and strangely enough I found that I liked what I was writing and liked my characters and wanted to get to know them better.

Someday I may finish the novel. Someday I may write something completely different. I may never do more than write on this blog. But I am content. I am content with what I write. I am content with where I have been and where I am going. I am content that I had one teacher who thought I could do it and I am glad I had the chance to share what I had written with her. For now I will just stay on side one and let Charlie Brown keep winning while I keep writing.

The Complications of Santa

2013-12-26T12:22:00.000-08:00

I say with a sigh of relief and only a hint of sadness that Christmas is over. I say it with relief not because I do not enjoy the holidays. Not because I have eaten more than my body weight in sweets and meat. And not because I am exhausted to the very marrow in my bones. I am glad because Santa Claus has become a thorn in my paw, a complicated man who complicated my life this year from November 1st to December 25th.
I will share with you a conversation I had with my almost eight year old as we drove to the store to get gifts for his siblings.
   Child: "So Mom, why can't we see Santa? Why does he have to be secret?"
   Me:"Because if we see him he loses his magic."
   Child: "Well good thing he hires all those guys to pretend to be him then."
   Me:"Good point."
   Child:"Why do the elves get to see him then if no one else can see him?"
   ME:"Because they are his helpers. He needs helpers you know. It is a big job for one person."
   Child:" You said he was magic, if he is magic he shouldn't need helpers. Did you know there is witch who delivers presents?"
   Me: "A witch? I don't think so. I think you are confusing your holidays."
Child:" No there is. Mrs. F said so in school. Kids put out 13 shoes and get a present in each shoe."
Me: "That sounds like more than one story."
Child: "Well it's true . How come everyone doesn't have Santa? And why does he look different in pictures? And why do you keep telling me something is too expensive for Santa if he is magic he just makes whatever we want,right?"
   I would like to say this was the end of the conversation but it kept going until I steered him into the store and distracted him . This is nothing new for our middle child. He is the most curious and the first one to question just about anything. I did however have to look up the "witch" thing and as it turns out one of his teachers must have been explaining the Italian "witch" who brings toys to children on the Feast of Epiphany on January 6th. The legend of La Befana says that the wise men stopped at her hut to ask directions to Bethlehem and invited her to join them. She refused and then refused a shepard later and when she saw the great light in the sky she thought she should have gone with them. She gathered toys from her home that belonged to her deceased child and tried to find the manger. She didn't and it is said each year she travels to find the Christ Child and leaves toys for good children and coal for bad children. So as usual my middle child was giving me the true story. One of these days maybe I will learn.
   I do not remember being so curious or asking as many questions. Perhaps I did. It just didn't seem so complicated. We took it on faith that Santa was everywhere. It never occurred to me that Santa couldn't be at the mall and at G.Fox at the same time. He was just where I was. I never gave any thought to how he delivered everything in one night, when in truth it has to be a logistical nightmare. I am not sure how he does it when I cannot even get three kids to three different places in one afternoon without calling for help from the National Guard.
Kids are more sophisticated today I suppose. They have too many things in an instant. They can look up anything they want any time they want and get an instant answer. Too much that is explained and explained some more so that just believing in something becomes nearly impossible.
When we were kids, in my memory it was just more simple. My sister and I were taken to Hartford to see the lights on Constitution Plaza, eat dinner, when we were very young I suppose we saw Santa also. I think then he was in G.Fox&Co. That was a tradition for many years. We would get a book then too. I still have two of the books I got..."Strega Nona" and "The Phantom Toll Booth." We would also take a tour through the toy department that was up on top floor. I remember this because the ceiling was so low I thought my dad might hit his head. The year I was in fourth grade, we made this trip and when I came to the toy department I stopped in front of the dolls. There was a section of Madame Alexander dolls. I had no idea that they were the American girl doll of today back then, I just fell in love with one doll. She had blonde hair that curled at the bottom and blue eyes that shut when you laid her down. She was in a package and I just stood and stared at her. I pointed her out to my dad who said,"Umm." I think he took a glance at the price tag and then ushered me elsewhere. I managed to point her out to my mom and that became my soul focus for Christmas. It was that simple. One doll. How hard could that be?
This year my 4 year old caught sight of the "Doc McStuffins Check up Center" as it was advertised on television. I glanced at it, did what my dad did and said,"Umm." It wasn't until a couple weeks later and only two weeks before Christmas that she mentioned it again with the same enthusiasm I had for that doll. So I logged on and searched. It was listed at Toys R Us. I added it to my cart and a box popped up that said "item no longer available". So I searched WalMart. I found one at a local Walmart, added it to my cart and smiled to myself. Less then 24 hours later I got an email saying the item was no longer available. I panicked. I started searching. Google searching, eBay, Craigs list. Nothing. I even searched stores in the towns near my father and in-laws; many, many zip codes away. Apparently it was one of the hot toys this year, like the Cabbage Patch doll in the 80's. Each day I tried to find it. And each day drew another round of Christmas panic. I tried explaining to my 4 year old one afternoon that she might want to ask Santa for something else just in case. And this is where the 8 year old came into the conversation telling me that Santa can do anything, he makes everything so why wouldn't everyone get what they want. I did what any smart mother would do I delegated to my husband.
"Your turn." I said "You find the elusive Doc McStuffins Check up Center." Well he did five days before Christmas on Craig's list. It was more then I wanted to pay and to be honest the thought of my husband driving off to some stranger's house to get a toy, a few days before Christmas made my stomach flip into my throat. So while he was driving I took one last look. I found one at WalMart and called my husband. We would have it by Christmas Eve. My husband turned around and came home. Disaster averted.
   Later that night, the same night my 8 year old was grilling me about Santa and all his mysteries, we were wandering through K Mart when he stopped in front of a toy and shouted," Mom! This is what little miss wants from Santa! Do you think she'll get it? Maybe we should get it just in case Santa doesn't." Without looking at the toy I said,"Oh I am sure Santa got her what she wanted." He moved in front of me with a box. It was a small box and not what the 4 year old told me she wanted.
I looked blankly at the toy in the box while my 8 year old smiled at me. Are you kidding? A small toy for less than 20 bucks in a store less than 15 miles from my house. It was that easy? I had spent countless hours searching, worrying,negotiating other toys into the bargain when it was really much more simple. I had lost sight of everything I was trying to help my own children believe. I had become so focused on finding one "perfect"gift I hadn't even been paying attention. I had turned something simple into something complicated and loathsome. I had lost trust in the magic of the season. Luckily along with his gift for asking too many questions, my 8 year old has the ability to take in and remember anything said or done within a three mile radius of him.
When we got home I asked little miss what she wanted from Santa and she confirmed she wanted the Octonauts Octopod. My 8 year old smiled at me. I bit the inside of my cheek and said with as much sweetness as I could muster, "And how about the check up center? You know Doc McStuffins?" My sweet child smiled back and said simply," Oh I want that for my birthday."
Just as my daughter doesn't know what occurred before Christmas morning, I don't know how the Madame Alexander doll was purchased for me that wonderful Christmas. I don't know if my father said no because it was too expensive and my mother wore him down or if he thought it was the perfect gift for me. I don't know if he travelled back to G.Fox or if they found it somewhere closer. Or if they had to search because it was a tough gift to find. It didn't matter for all I knew Santa had brought it and my parents had nothing to do with it.
On Christmas morning as each gift was ripped from it's wrapping, squeals and shouts filled our living room. My 4 year nearly passed out when she opened the small box with cheaper toy. My 8 year old was right, it was exactly what she wanted. Perhaps it had been Santa who sent us into that store two nights before Christmas. He is magic after all.

2013-12-09T04:14:00.000-08:00

My daughter is four. She is sweet and funny, what some might have called her years ago is precocious but I hardly ever hear that word any more. She is shy around people she doesn't know but once she feels confident that facade slides away like a small pebble in a strong tide and you can hardly keep up with her conversation.

   When I was pregnant with her I was convinced she was a boy. Everything about my pregnancy seemed the same as it had for her brothers. My husband picked out a name for a boy and we hardly discussed any options for a girl, we were that sure it wouldn't be a girl. I wasn't even confident I would know what to do with a girl. Our house was full of trains and superheroes, boxer shorts and star wars t-shirts. Where would a girl fit in?

   When she was born and my doctor announced the arrival of a baby girl I burst into tears. My poor husband thought I was disappointed but I guess even I didn't realize how deeply I had been hoping for a girl. My husband dialed our phone and called my dad who had been staying with our boys. When I heard his voice I started crying again and told him we had a girl. He responded, "I am so glad. I was hoping you would have a girl." Perhaps we were all hoping but we were all afraid to say it.

   It didn't take me long to realize having a girl isn't very different from having a boy. She had the same needs as an infant but was even more quiet and agreeable then either of her brothers. She smiled quickly and easily and she never had colic. When she was four months old our pediatrician had some concerns about her left hip and sent us off to the children's hospital just to get "checked out". As it turned out she had hip dysplasia and they placed her in a Pavlik Harness that same day. As we walked out of the hospital she cried and fussed which made me cry and fuss. It was a rainy day in July and cold for a summer day. The grey sky matched my mood.

   As we reached the elevator another mom came up behind us. Her daughter, perhaps eight years old was very disabled and in a wheelchair. I looked at the mom and stopped crying. This was a little bump and we would get through it. And we did. Our four month girl just took it in stride. It didn't interrupt her sleeping, she slept on her back, legs hanging in mid-air thanks to the harness.

   Four months later we had our final check up and the nurse practitioner pulled off the harness. I put little shoes on her feet and smiled all the way home. So did she. She grabbed her toes in the car as though we had just added them to her body. Her face full of wonder and excitement.

    As she has gotten older she has maintained that beautiful easy going attitude, now with a side of sassy-ness which I have come to admire. I love the way she will hug me while I am washing the dishes. Or whisper from the back seat of the car that she loves me. But most of all I love her ability to wear a pink striped shirt with orange plaid pants and strut out our door with so much confidence it is dripping like syrup, thick and sweet. If you are wondering if I let her go out in such an outfit the answer is yes. I pick my battles. I also don't want to put in her mind that she has to fit into a particular mold. That she is like all the other little girls her age and she should wear pink with pink and orange with orange. I am past trying to squeeze her into clothes the way I did with her oldest brother. That poor child wasn't allowed out unless he resembled a GAP ad.

    My own mother would not have let me traipse about wearing mismatched clothes. It would have looked too much like I was one of the orphans her own parents cared for when she was growing up. I matched. And for years my sister and I matched. We wore matching polyester short set in summer and matching flannel nightgowns, especially on Christmas morning, I still have the photos to prove it. Our hair was neat and combed. We were pressed and ironed. We wore stockings and skirts and patent leather shoes. My mother might be amused by my daughter's flare for personal fashion , then again she might have wanted to buy out the local Gymboree. There are times when I am tempted to put a sign on my daughter's back that reads, "I chose my own outfit today, my mother had nothing to do with this." It isn't worth the effort. Mothers of little girls look at me with that secret knowing smile and I know they at least understand.

    Last weekend my precious little girl took craft scissors in hand and cut her own hair. Her , may I say, beautiful wavy blond hair that had finally grown out from her last attempt to cut her own hair.   She appeared in the kitchen, small mirror in hand and large sad eyes on her face. When I saw her I am sure my own face mirrored her feelings and she burst into tears. She had given herself a mullet only Mel Gibson could have been proud of. Once the shock wore off though she was fine. I was having trouble breathing especially after finding the pile of hair on the floor. I didn't have time to take her to my own salon and get it fixed until later in the week. On Sunday she went to a birthday party when not a single friend seemed to notice her handy work, even though it was staring them in the face. On Monday she walked proudly up to her preschool teacher and announced that she and mommy had cut her hair. I did quickly explain the truth and searched for materials to make sign.

    By the time we reached the salon three days later she was perfectly comfortable with her hair and was perfectly angry with me for getting it cut more. My stylist didn't have much to work with and she did the best she could but it wasn't what my daughter wanted. If you asked her today a week later if she likes her hair cut she will tell you unequivocally "No!". But then she will tell you "It will grow." She's sassy and smart. And I admire her for it. I admire that she can walk around looking like a small child out of "Mad Max" and wear clothes that don't match and carry that without an ounce of self-consciousness leaking into her being.

   A few weeks after she was born while I was sitting on the couch cradling her and sniffing up her new baby smell. We had not planned on having a third child. We had not planned on having a girl. Before we found out I was pregnant again we had given away almost all of our baby stuff. I guess sometimes you don't realize what you need in your life until it is there staring you in the face. My husband came and sat next to us and smiled down at his daughter, who has managed to wrap him up like a present in her own way over the years, and said, "She is your mother's last gift to you."

   He is right. Only my mother would dress her differently.

I Guess I am Part of the Problem

2013-11-29T15:40:00.000-08:00

Yesterday morning, thanks to a loud and annoying cat who will soon be up for adoption should anyone want him, I was up at 5:30. By 7:00 AM I realized I was missing the avocados for my appetizer I told my sister in law I would bring. Not that the day would crumble around us without my fabulous dip but after two cups of tea and being awake that long it became like that itch you cannot scratch. So I threw on my coat , grabbed my shopping bags and told the two of three children awake I would be back soon and left with the warning to not wake up their father.
   Once at the grocery store it was so quiet and peaceful, there were about three of us there at that hour. I decided to not just get my one item and hoof it home, why not shop for the coming week? I was alone, I had a list in my pocketbook I had intended for another day over the weekend and even had some coupons! It was like hitting the lottery. So I ambled through the store, enjoyed taking the time to look at items, figure out it the coupon was beneficial or not. Going slowly enough that I was not doubling back in the store several times because there was no one to distract my attention from he task at hand, not even someone else's kid!
   It wasn't until I got the register and saw the very unhappy faces of the both the young woman at the register and the young man bagging my stuff that I realized I was what I claimed not to be. I was a Thanksgiving day shopper. I tried to smile and pretend I had no idea it was Thanksgiving. I tried to pretend it wasn't 7:30 in the morning. I tried to pretend I was the anti- Thanksgiving day shopper I have claimed to be. I shrunk down into myself and pulled the collar of my coat higher, wishing for a pair of sunglasses, trying to hide like a celebrity. I wished them both a happy Thanksgiving because I thought it was the least I could do and it was met with grumbles. I can't say that I blame them.
   When I got home I confessed to my husband and stated," For the record , even if I am missing something next year I am not shopping on Thanksgiving Day!" His answer," How many holidays have you worked over the years?"
   He is right. I won't count the number of Thanksgiving dinners I missed or left early. The New Years' Eves I missed or Christmas Eves and Days I was working but although I never enjoyed leaving my family on those days, at least when I got to work I understood that the people I was serving had to be in the hospital, it wasn't their choice to be away from their families. They weren't out shopping for the best deal, shoving and pushing their way to the latest electronic gadget they just had to have. They were there because the most important part of their life; their health was ailing and they needed me and my colleagues to help them get better.
   Holidays in hospitals and nursing homes have a festive atmosphere, as festive as it can get I suppose. Families of the loved ones they are visiting almost always bring treats for the staff. The staff bring treats for the staff. One place I worked we had a whole dinner set up, each of us bringing in something to share. It was always hard to leave my family but it always felt good when a patient was happy to see me. I had many apologize to me because I had to work. I never grumbled because I never felt that angry about it.
   There is a difference. I heard someone say it was good for our economy to have stores open on Thanksgiving, that all those people working would get over time and they probably needed it or they would turn around and spend it therefore helping our economy more. I think it is sad that our lives have dwindled down to the greater good of the economy and not the greater good of our society. Perhaps that woman at Wal-Mart cashing you out already works 60 hours a week and now instead of that one day she can sit with her family she is working yet again. Over time in your bank account isn't nearly as long lasting as over time with your family.
   So next year I will not even head out to the grocery store on Thanksgiving morning. I will not be part of a growing trend on our society that feels buying gifts and spending money is the only way to be happy or make others happy. I will stay home and even if we're missing the turkey we'll make the best of it and be thankful for the blessing of what we have and not rush out to get what we don't have. In the end the people who love us is the greatest gift all year round.

2013-08-31T04:46:00.001-07:00

It's a Dog's Life

One bright Saturday morning in may thirteen years ago my husband to be awoke early and cheerfully said "let's go see some puppies." And even though we have known each other since the 6th grade I had yet to learn that "let's go see" translates to "let's purchase, buy, bring home" as I did learn several years later when he went to "see" about a boat and that boat wound up in my driveway..but that is a story for another morning.

That sunny morning we drove to Massachusetts. I knew he was interested in getting a dog. I wasn't against the idea. I love animals and had wanted a dog when i was growing up. I was excited. But I will also say we were 6 months away from our wedding day. In retrospect a puppy was not something we needed at the time. We arrived at the breeders home and my husband sat down on her kitchen floor and a puppy, all clumsy and wobbly fell into his lap. My husband looked like a five year old. His grin spread wide like the Grinch when his heart heart grew five sizes that day. A half hour later we were driving home and an hour later little Phoebe threw up all over me and our relatiosnhip was over before it even had begun.

Phoebe, it turned out was a lot of work. Which puppies are if you are not familair with puppy training. It is almost equivalent to having an infant in your hosue, which I can say because I have now had both. Phoebe was up at 5 am ready to play and run. We would take her for very long walks and still her energy was not drained. Mine in contrast was. She needed to be walked twice a day and trained and trained and trained some more. It wasn't what I thought it would be. I was a busy woman. I had flowers to order, bridesmaids to corale and a full time job. I really couldn't understand why the dog had to stop and sniff every little blade of grass , the same blades of grass she had jsut sniffed less then ten hours earlier. I thought Phoebe would just go with the flow. She would follow commands and obey the rules because that is what dogs did. I had a very Lassi-esque idea of of what owning a dog would be like and Phoebe was not living up to the expectation. What made matters worse was Phoebe's ambivilance towards me. She was always delighted to see Greg. She would come when he called. She would sit and stay when he commanded. I could call her until the sun set, until the moon was high and she would just look at me , as though I wasn't saying anything she could understand. My husband said it was because my voice wasn't low enough. But I knew the truth, she didn't like me enough to be bothered.

From the beginning Phoebe and I had a casual relationship. It was obvious to her because she was a smart puppy that I wasn't going anywhere and she would have to share my husband. So when he wasn't around she would reluctanctly respond to me and I in return would bride her with treats off my plate and lots of cheese. She loves cheese. a year after we were married we moved to our first home in Nw Britain and Phoebe became a wonderful protector. She had and still has a fierce bark and yellow eyes that can look menacing if you don't know her. She managed to scare away people who wanted to sell us things we didn't need and people who wanted to help us get saved. She barked at the mailman until he threw her a bisquit and she barked when someone came past the house.

Our life moved along and with each new baby Phoebe adjusted. She never growled or snapped. She was walked less and given fewer treats but still she barked fiercely at strangers and stayed close. When we first moved to Portland another dog wandered into out yard as I was outside playing with the boys who were 1 and 4 at the time. Before I knew what had happened Phoebe had this intruder pinned to the ground. We were her pack and she would give all for us. And yet I still felt like she wasn't living up to my expectations of how a dog should be. She was happy being in another room. She only wagged her tail for my husband and rarely showed affection towards the kids. It felt disappointing. I felt let down.

And it took a simple conversation with my husband to bring it all to light. This spring my husband and I did what we have done for the past several years. We flip our garden soil, we pick out plants. We buy annuals and vegetables. We plant and in the beginning I help to water and weed. I like to dig. I enjoy making holes in the ground and placing plants in. I enjoy picking out colorful flowers and arranging them in pots. But as time goes on I forget to water and I forget to weed. I once joked to a friend , who is like my husband, an avid gardener; that I love perrenials because they just show up year after year. How hard can gardening be? Gardening is not easy. There is a science to knowing what plants need, how much sun, water, shade. The truth is I do not enjoy watering, or weeding. I enjoy the look of the garden but not the work that goes into it. My husband came in the house a couple weeks ago with a few tomatoes. I said "wow look at those! Tomatoes already?" " He nodded and looked just slightly aggravated. He said "yes already and you would know that if you helped to weed once in awhile." I nodded back but then I realized he was asking me to be something I am not. I am not a gardner. I have tried. But a true gardener loves the whole process. A true gardener enjoys picking the weeds, deadheading and keeping plants fed. This is not who I am.

I smiled and said" The truth is I don't like weeding. I would rather sit in your pretty garden and read a book while you do the weeding." He looked genuinely disappointed for a moment but his smile returned. It has taken several summers of frustration for my husband to realize he did not marry a fellow garden enthusiaist. I promised to stop digging holes and planting perenial beds that he would have to later weed. I also added " I do have other good qualities you know." " Yes ," he said' You do". Although at that moment he was probably working hard to conjure up a few.

We have the tendency, I believe to not always accept people for who they are. To somehow take the base model with the idea that we can add what we want as time goes on. That with a little extra work we can make someone fit into the mold we have created in our minds of who they should be. Sometimes we do this before we even know someone well and sometimes even after we have known someone for a length of time. We say things like " I love him but". "She is great excpet". There should be no "except" only acceptance. the truth is relationships only work when we accept people for who they are. We accept their strengths and weaknesses, love them for their talents and try to over loo where they may fall short. Whether someone is organized or constantly in disarray, affectionate or unable to display affection, a true gardener or one who just enjoys the beauty of the garden, each relationship we have feeds some part of our soul. Inspirational writer jonthan Lockwood Huie says "happiness lies in accepting everyone in our lives exactly as they are. We cause ourselves untold misery whenever we believe others to be imperfect and try to change them." We can focus on people's weaknesses, sometimes it is easier then finding their strengths but really don't we all know our own wekanesses? I could list some of mine for you but the list seems to grow each year. She talks too long when given a captive audience" so I will move on .

Phoebe grew old without us noticing and last Decemeber we rescued a puppy in the hopes of giving Phoebe a little boost. it worked for awhile and she still has some spark in her even though she is now 13 years old. Ellie , our very large Great Pyrenese/Lab mix is a loveable , clumsy mutt. She comes when I call. She follows me from room to room and her excitement in seeing our kids is beautiful until she knocks them down in her enthusiasm. I have spent more time with Ellie and done most of the training myself. I read books and watched many episodes of "the Dog Whisperer".My conversation revolved around postive reinforcement and calm, assertive energy. It finally dawned on me that Phoebe wasn't being a bad dog. That Phoebe loved my husband because he was the one who sat on the floor and welcomed her into his life. My husband was the one who walked her with patience and trained her with his kindness, while I jsut wanted an instant Lassie. I wanted the beauty of the garden without all the work.

Ellie is a lot of work. She gets into trouble. stuffed animals have lost eyes and dolls have lost arms and legs. I have quickly tossed these chewed items into the trash, making me either an accomplice or an enabler. She is after all still a puppy. Which is hard to believe since she is about 100 pounds. Looks can be deceiving. I find myself reminding my husband how Phoebe was when she was a puppy and I know that even though I have joked for the past 13 years that Phoebe has only tolerated me, we have been intricately connected by those we love. And that even though she was not living up to my idea of what a dog should be she has always been true to herself. Phoebe is now a gentle old dog who still wags her tail for my husband and comes to me when I open the cheese drawer. but she is who she is.

And I realized as I watched Ellie, our new puppy dig up our back yard while Phoebe just watched that I had misjudged Phoebe all these years. I had held Phoebe to a standard that she has never been wired to live up to. Yes she is a dog but not all dogs are created equal. She has not been the affectionate, lassie-esque dog I thought she should be and so each day I set her up for failure in my eyes. Each time she didn't come when I called, each time she would run when I said "stay". She had failed. When in truth I had failed her. I did not understand that just she is not only a dog she is also her own person. She has a personality and she has likes and dislikes. Yes she and ellie are very different dogs. Ellie wants to sit in your lap and Phoebe is happy sitting in another room. Ellie will wag her tail fiercley for anyone and Phoebe only wags her tail for my husband. She has always loved him most and intead of admiring her for her good taste in men, I resented that she wasn't the dog I thought she should be.

　

　

Cesar MIlan, The dog whisperer says " you do not get the dog you want, you get the dog you need." I suppose this is true of people as well as dogs. People come into our lives because we need them. We need the gifts they have, we need the lessons they can teach. I needed Phoebe to teach me humility, to show me that we may all look similar and we have mechanics that make us move and think and feel in a similair way but within those mechanics are the intracies of emotion, gender, humanity. We cannot live without one another.

We thrive on the love , support and intimacy our relationships allow us. It is up to us to treat one another with kindness and respect. For love is patient and love is kind. When we welcome people into our lives we should do so in a way that does not set them up for failure but rather brings their strengths to the surface because we all benefit when our talents are encouraged,nutured and shared.

Our realtionships spread before us something akin to gardener's empty bed in spring. We will reap what we sow.

Phoebe and Ellie, enjoying a walk

Ellie and me

2013-08-31T04:36:00.001-07:00

I had the privilege this summer to deliver the message to our congregation while our minister was away. The following post is the first one. I thought I would share it with my readers. Enjoy.

This summer we will explore our senses. Today I was asked to talk about taste. I thought it would be an easy thing to talk about but I found it a very broad subject. There are five tastes bitter , sour, sweet, salty and savory. I thought perhaps I would discuss bitter versus sweet. But that is really self explanatory isn;t it? We know what it is to have a sweet life and what it is to have bitterness. We see it , we read about it perhaps we have experienced a little a of both in our lives.

In reading and preparing for this morning I thought more about my experience with food, what tastes I have come to enjoy and what tastes I am pretty sure I will never enjoy.

My culinary experience as a child was not wide ranged. I enjoyed peanut butter and jelly, mashed potatoes, pickles. Things that were crunchy but not necessarily nutritious. When I was very young we had a well meaning neighbor who dropped a dinner off for us. My mother was in the hospital so this neighbor brought over a tuna casserole. My father warmed it in the oven and scooped a pile onto my plate. Oh no, whatever that was sitting on my plate was doing things to my stomach I just didn't understand. I didn't eat it. As a parent I can now understand the frustration I am sure my father felt, being in a hurry to get to the hospital to see his wife, having two daughters who were turning their noses at a meal he was thankful he didn't have to prepare; but I held firm. WHen he dropped us at another neighbor graciously helping out, she greeted us at the door with small bags of chips. "Karen cannot have that," my father said," She didn't eat her dinner." I am sure a knowing look passed between the adults but it didn't matter. It is nearly 40 years later and I stand by that decision. So I guess you can say I was not hungry enough to enjoy what I thought would most certainly be bitter to taste.

My taste stayed simple over the years. I didn't experiment much. I didn't like strawberries for their texture and I didn't like fruit that was soft and juicy. I didn't eat tomatoes and I didn't even know what asparagus was. It wasn't until after college that I tried to be more adventurous. While living in New Jersey I met a wonderful young nurse who was from the phillipines. SHe introduced me to sushi and I never looked back. I realized how much I could be missing by not at least trying something new. When I moved to Tuscon I was introduced to Tex-Mex and a wonderful herb called cilantro. And another world opened up. Black beans and re-fried beans. The sweet , the salty and the savory! While living in MAryland a friend invited me to dinner at his home. His father, who was also from the Philipines made a chicken and rice dinner that I can still taste if I concentrate. Filled with garlic and sesame and soy sauce and not Uncle Ben's rice but a jasmine infused delight. What fun eating had become!

But I had not ventured into cooking. It seemed rather complicated. I was able to boil water and make spaghetti. I could cook some chicken and steam brocoli but to try anything fancy was beyond my scope. I had cookbooks. Betty Crocker and The Joy of Cooking. But where do you find exotic ingredients to make a recipe work? How do you prepare meat so it is tender and not tough and chewy? Cooking, it seemed was a lot of work.

It was many years later when I was a new mom. Drake was an infant. It was a cold winter and I was not used to being home with nothing in particular to do. Drake was a calm and easy baby, my how things can change, but he was and if I enjoyed shopping we could have hit every mall between here and New York. But I don't . So we got cable instead. And I discovered Food Network! I am a visual learner. Things come so much easier if I can watch it happen then copy it. In school I would read about a medical procedure but until I could see it in action it didn't make much sense and so it was with cooking! Oh the excitement of watching someone bring the food together step by glorious step! It opened my culinary curiosity. I learned to chop, saute, mince and sear. I started to describe food as creamy, succulent. I told people I was letting the flavors "marry" when I described my food preparation. I bought a fancy knife and saute pan. I discovered what a lemon could add to a recipe. I learned how to "zest" and I made fresh lemonade. What is sour when you bite it becomes sweet with a little effort.

My husband was very happy that winter. His taste buds had always been more adventurous than mine but now he was coming home to cilantro pesto pasta with shrimp, soy seared scallops and home made hot fudge. Even meatloaf became an occasion with thyme and bacon added to the recipe. Most dinners were successful. But even when they weren't he ate them. I learned that silence meant I had hit the joy button in his stomach and a polite, " This is good." really meant "you don't need to make this again" . And that is okay because it was and remains a learning process.

It was around the same time my taste buds were trying to expand and reach out to new flavors, my spiritual side was calling out. I was working for a company that sent me from hospital to hospital to fill in where there was a staffing shortage. I enjoyed the experience and with each new town I found a new church to try out. I tried Lutheran, I tried Baptist, I tried some not so traditional. Some were engaging and welcoming and some not so much. In Georgia my good friend Paula invited me to church with her, a large congregational church that was welcoming and I enjoyed it. But in all these trips to church I never onced opened a Bible. I don't know why . I guess I didn't think it was necessary. Or perhaps it just seemed too large , too omninous. I had watched The Ten Commandments with my mother when I was young. I got the general jist. I tried reading the Bible once when I was in HS and I couldn't get past the Old Testmament and all the names and who was the son of whom so I gave up.

There was no Bible Channel to bring it all to life. The visual side of me just needed someone else to bring meaning to all the words.

I have Bibles. I have several. None of them are mine. I have my grandmother's confirmation Bible given to her on her confirmation day June 1914. I have my grandfather's Bibles. And a Bible given to my mother by her grandfather. But all of these are of sentimental value, they are worn and near falling apart. So the words sit unread. In 2001 I joined a congregational church and left the work to someone else. it's like eating out, you get the benefit of someone else's knowledge and experience and you walk away with a full belly. .

This past winter I attended a Bible study a friend was hosting. On the very first morning we sat in her comfortable living room surrounded by food she had prepared . Normally I would have been asking her about her food where she got the recipes how she prepared each item but it was her Bible that had me intrigued. It was huge! So much bigger than any of my sentimental Bibles and I thought this Bible study may take longer than I thought. When I asked her about her Bible she gave me a smile filled with joy, " it has an index" she said. " A what?" An index she explained so when she wanted a Bible verse she could look up a word and find a verse that might speak to her, bring meaning or understanding in a difficult time or express the joy in her life. She handed the Bible to me and I opened it. Nirvana! It had pictures! Photographs, maps, diagrams and an index. just like you would look up peppered flank steak in your cookbook you could look up "faith", which I don't necessarily recommend unless you have lots of time to burn. I had found my cook book Bible! I had found a version of food network for my soul! I ordered the same Bible. When it came my husband flipped through it. He stopped at Mathew 6:25, his favorite verse. "Therefore I tell you do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food and the body more than clothes?" Simple , to the point and how my husband lives. Being a man who prefers a recipe with less than five ingredients, one Bible verse pretty much sums it up.

Now it didn't seem so daunting. Finding a scripture was at my fingertips. "Gracious words are a honey comb sweet to the soul and healing to the bones." It is like having hot fudge at your finger tips, okay almost like having hot fudge.

We need to feed our souls just as we feed our bodies. We have to balance the sweet and the sour in life. Life is not full of all or one. There is a CHinese proverb that says " Sour, sweet, bitter, pungent must all be tasted." And it is true. We cannot appreciate the sweetness if there is not some sour or bitter along the way.

On my husband's 40th birthday I arranged a small dinner party. I prepared tyler Florence's horseradish crusted prime rib and Rachel Ray's "you won't be single for long Vodka cream sauce", which I can tell you from personal experience is true to its title. One of our friend's who was coming for dinner asked me a week or so before when I told her what I was preparing inhaled sharply and said " aren't you nervous it won't come out right?" " I simply said no. it was hard to explain the faith I had in Tyler Florence and Rachel ray and in Pizzeria Davinci should it all go wrong. (when in doubt , order out) And so it is in the journey we take with God.

Faith is not a sprint, it's more like a marathon. Just as you wouldn't crank the oven to 500 degrees in the hopes of roasting the chicken quicker. You don't just wake up full of faith. Faith comes in bits and pieces, it comes from following the words given to us. The Bible is our cookbook for life. It gives us the words we need to be successful, to be joyful. There are more than a hundred versus with the word joy in them. I didn't know this until I had an index.

And so we don't bite the lemon just because there is a promise of lemonade. We take the time to slice, juice, zest and add sugar. We follow the recipe with patience and the reward is sweet. Julia Child said " you don't have to cook fancy or complicated masterpieces-just good food from fresh ingredients." And that is how we can live our lives. The Bible is filled with recipes to see you through the complicated and the trying. To find a joyful life you just need to take the time, follow the instructions and the rewards will be there for you to taste.

Amen

2013-06-11T10:40:00.001-07:00

Good-bye 182

2012-09-24T09:59:00.001-07:00

In 2001 my husband and I purchased our first home. We had a patient real estate agent that took us through so many homes we said no to I half expected her to fire us. She didn’t. She paid attention to the things we did like and what made us say, “Are you kidding me?” Thankfully she had a good sense of humor. And her patience paid off for all of us. She found a perfect cape, yellow and sun filled with a small yard in a cul-de-sac neighborhood. I did a drive by when she gave me the address and I was smitten even with the over grown bushes and peeling paint. It looked like an antique home with its center chimney and eight over eight windows but was only a little older than me. I was in love.

We moved in on a warm day in May. Friends and family turned out to help us. The kitchen had no dishwasher and the stove was a behemoth of white enamel, original to the home. The walls needed paint but we had Dutch doors in the kitchen and a corner toilet in the small bathroom, which was quaint and a great conversation piece. The full bath had pale yellow tile on the walls and smaller yellow tile on the floor. The vanity ran almost the full length of the wall with a place for a chair. The living room was one large room with a fireplace in the middle. There was a screen porch with stone tile and large windows bathing the large room with sun and warmth. We had struck gold on our first home.

A few months after we settled in our neighbor came over while I was in the yard and began chatting about how nice it was to see the house with some life in it. She gave me the history. An older couple bought the land and had the house built in the late 60’s and by older she meant a couple in their 30’s with no children. She looked at my apologetically, realizing I was in my 30’s. She explained the couple lived in the house for a few years when the woman became ill and then passed away. The husband lived alone for a short time. The house stood empty for many years until it was purchased by a young couple. The couple we purchased it from, according to my neighbor, was never home. They were both executives with Nordstrom’s. It didn’t surprise me because the house barely looked lived in and the stove was immaculate. We had wondered because although the house was clean, it hadn’t been given much love.

Two weeks ago my childhood home sold. My father had it on the market for quite some time. It was outdated, as was the charming cape. I tried to see it through the eyes of someone who would walk in, looking for perhaps their first home. I suppose there isn’t much that is charming about a raised ranch with a brown tiled bathroom and shiny off white wall paper but then my vision is blurry from the moments chiseled into my memory along with the tile and the wall paper. Perhaps charm can be over-rated. Wall paper covers every wall and the downstairs has wood paneling. My pink rug is still there along with the dainty rose wall paper I picked out. The trees in the yard, pine trees from various Christmases, over growing and crowding out the yard I ran through as a child, jumping into leaf piles and playing tag with friends.

The new couple is probably moved in now. The wall paper being stripped and the paneling pulled down. The walls will be freshly painted and new voices will pepper the rooms. Perhaps they are as excited as my husband and I were when we moved into our little cape and painted the walls and planted new shrubs. It feels wonderful to give a home a fresh beginning and decorate it with your life. I hope my childhood home gets the same revival.

When my father first put the house on the market he did offer to sell it to us. I won’t say my immediate response was no. I am too sentimental to just wave the offer away as though it were a fly trying to land. I did give it some thought and the more I thought the more I realized I would have lived perpetually in the 70’s or worse in the 80’s. No one should have to re-live the 80’s. The past is something I am all too good at retrieving but not very good at letting go of. And retrieving too far into the past doesn’t leave room for the present. I also realized as my father moved much of his house into my house; coolers, Tupperware, furniture, that it is not the walls that hold the memories. The memories follow us and shape us and comfort us. It is not necessary to live in the past to appreciate it and retrieve it …once in awhile.

Summer Memories

2012-07-19T00:07:00.000-07:00

As a child I spent many summers at a small beach community on the Connecticut shore. It has been years since I have done anything more than visit for a day. My husband, preferring the Cape was never convinced that a piece of heaven could exist along Connecticut’s shoreline. I managed to convince him last summer that a week would be all it would take to make him a believer; it took less than a few hours.

I suppose there are a few communities left that have playgrounds and tennis courts and activities for kids that don’t require a mom to lug everyone back and forth all day long. But this community holds a sweet spot in my heart. My kids can do what I did, ride bikes, swim, go crabbing, play on the playground and I can see them at all these activities from my front porch. Of course I don’t think they fully grasp what a gift this is. I am sure I didn’t grasp how lucky I was to spend lazy summers bike riding , playing in the sand and eating a diet of corn on the cob and ice cream. Now as I bike around the years slip from my body, dropping a decade here and a decade there until I am freckle faced, toe headed and not to mention quite a few pounds lighter. I ride past cottages we rented, some updated, some not and can see through the windows and find myself playing “war” with my patient mother and two decks of cards, eating ice cream with my cousins and washing sand and salt off my tanned skin in the outdoor shower.

I can hear the waves lapping gently on the shore at night like a lullaby softly singing me to sleep. The thick hum of voices and laughter of the adults who came to visit my parents rings in my ears all these years later. Afternoons were spent swimming and digging in the sand until the six o’clock whistle blew and my father would have to concede that another beach day had come to an end and mom would be waiting for us. He would station me in the metal bike seat, no helmet, no belt and I would wobble behind him as he steered us home, his unbuckled sandal straps flapping all the way.

I would play with children I saw one month out of the year but we would pick up where we left off. We would make drippy sand castles and hunt for sea glass. We would wrap ourselves in towels and our feet in kelp like Roman sandals, and then parade up and down the boardwalk. Babies slept on blankets and the sweet smell of Coppertone coconut oil blew across your face with the breeze.

A group of older women sat near us each day. Their beach chairs creating a half circle facing the water and their voices chatting until the sun itself became tired. One woman had short cropped hair, white as a pale moon and silver bangle bracelets running up her arms. Her skin hung from her bones like dried kelp, brown and wrinkled, yet there was something innately attractive about her. Her whole being seemed one with the sand and the ocean as though she had been born from it. I watched for her arrival each day it signaled the completeness of my beach experience.

These women were perhaps grandmothers then. They may have been resting from their many summers of swimming, sand castle building and crabbing with their own children. I never knew their names. But I am sure their grandchildren are here somewhere. Time moves forward and although it does feel a bit like a time warp and 1975 is swirling around in my own mind, I can see the changes. Kids are now parents, parents now grandparents. The beaches are the same, the charge in the air each morning as the sun rises and the salt air blows in through the windows and the echo off the water of voices as people begin their day with a bike ride, a run or a walk with an old friend.

As I sit on the beach, my three year old perched on my lap, I am fully aware that to some young girl I am the older woman, perhaps slightly dried out by the sun but on the inside I am 5, digging in the sand and breathing in the salty sweetness of my childhood.

2012-06-20T07:36:00.001-07:00

I have been a nurse for nearly 20 years. It is hard to believe, especially considering how many years I have lamented over what a hard job it is. I remember a few years into my career as Florence Nightingale complaining to a friend about my job.

I said I should have picked something else. His response was, “If you weren’t a nurse, you would be a social worker, you have to help people.” That wasn’t what I was going for in the sympathy department, but he had a point. I am pretty sure I was the only kid in high school packing a First Aid kit.

Over the years I have been yelled at, sworn at, kicked and thrown up on, the latter two being not unlike my other day job as mom. I have emptied bed pans and given bed baths. I have spent more time with other people’s bodily fluids then I have with my own.
I have measured and examined and tested stuff better left without description should you be reading this over breakfast. I have also been hugged and thanked. I have been trusted and confided in. I have held someone’s hand as a doctor gave them bad news and cried with husbands, wives or children after their loved one passed on.

Over 20 years, I have had a cast of characters walk through my life. People I know I never would have met if I had not been assigned to care for them. Over 20 years, I have had a cast of characters walk through my life. People I know I never would have met if I had been assigned to care for them.
As I was working as a home-care nurse several years ago, I had the chance to realize how truly special my job is by walking through the door of an elderly couple’s home on a humid August day. The house was pretty beat up on the outside but that hardly prepared me for the inside.
On first inhalation, when I entered the house, I was overcome by a stale smell of mothballs and cat urine. The wife who greeted me was about 4 feet tall with white hair pulled into a tight bun at the top of her head. She was thrilled to see me and for a moment I thought perhaps she thought I was a cleaning service.

She escorted me to her small kitchen where her husband, my new patient, sat. He greeted me with as much enthusiasm. He held out a thin hand and grasped mine rather tightly and smiled broadly.
I looked around the kitchen and saw dishes piled up in the sink and stuff on the counters. I gingerly sat on the chair. I pulled out my paperwork and started my usual spiel on how home care works. They listened intently and only after they asked if I would stay and help did I realize all they cared about was having me there.

They weren’t listening to all the mumbo jumbo I was spewing out at them. The husband did need my help and I realized as the visit progressed how scared he was and how scared she was for him.
They had been married for nearly 60 years, which seemed then and even now a wildly unobtainable goal. They were gentle and loving toward one another and found humor in almost anything. After my second visit, the wife dubbed me “Hollywood.”

At the time, I wore sunglasses that were tinted blue and my hair was very long and blonde. I guess I was as close to Hollywood as they were going to get. I had to make several visits with them before they were both comfortable with what they had to do. I always saved their visit for last. The smell seemed to stay with me and although I never really enjoyed being in their home, I truly enjoyed their company.

They were always happy to see me. They never complained about a late-day visit. They were never angry and they only did what I asked of them and never ran to their computer to show me what they found on WebMD that made my visit nearly obsolete. The wife was forever dusting off a knickknack from one her shelves and trying to give them to me. Thankfully we were not allowed to accept gifts. She whispered once she wouldn’t tell anyone and tried to put a glass cat in my bag.
I blocked her like a lineman and explained I could get into trouble. She backed off. She certainly didn’t want to get me into trouble.

On my last visit, I started to explain to them that I didn’t need to come any more. The wife looked rather shocked and the husband started ringing his hands. I was pretty sure I had explained in the beginning I wouldn’t be around long. Medicare doesn’t like you to overstay your welcome.
I came to understand that my first visit where I explained I wouldn’t be around long had gone completely over their heads. They had been too worried and all they wanted at that moment was someone to help them, show them what they needed and reassure them it was going to be OK.
Eventually the look of shock left them and the wife ran into the living room to dust off a glass elephant the size of my nursing bag. The husband grabbed my hand and gave me a long look with watery blue eyes. He told me I was wonderful and that he would miss my visits. They both hugged me goodbye and I closed the door, leaving behind the stale smell and the glass elephant.
I will always remember that couple and the smell in the house and the way the husband held my hand. It made me realize that even though I don’t always love certain tasks that come with my job, I do love being able to help someone. I had judged them by the contents of their house when I first met them.

I almost lost sight of what I was there for. That couple wasn’t worried about how I looked or how I dressed.They just needed me to be a kind soul and help them. I understood as I closed the door behind me it didn’t matter what was inside the home, what mattered was what I brought through the door and what I left behind.

2012-06-19T04:32:00.001-07:00

Spring in our house means flowers blooming, a mad rush to turn over the garden and seeds bought on the hope that this summer our tomatoes might outshine our sisters’.
My husband, being of a somewhat competitve nature, likes to talk a little trash and each year one of our sisters seems to outshine him. One year my sister’s carrots came in large and sweet, while ours were so scrawny the rabbits didn’t even bother to dig them up.

My husband’s sister has a large garden, that is not only full of all things yummy like asparagus, Swiss chard, onions and beets but it is also a visual delight. Perennials surround the outer edge dotting the area with blues and greens, violet and yellow. I would tell you what is in her garden but sadly I cannot recall.

My thumb is not exactly green. It is not gangrenous, there is some circulation and a pulse is palpable, but what I have learned so far about gardening is I am best at planting and that is where my talent ends. I love to dig in the dirt. I love to chop up the grass and pull up mounds of fresh sweet-smelling earth. I enjoy pulling at the roots of a plant and setting it in the ground, covering it, watering it and letting it take its time to do what it is meant to do; grow and be beautiful.
I do not like to weed. I am not a good planner. Both my sister and my sister-in-law have a talent for seeing the way a garden can look and implementing it. They have a connection to the mound of grass that allows them to pull away and create something that draws your eye from color to color. They also have the ability to name all the things they have planted and for that matter all the things I have planted.

Last spring my sister came to visit on a Sunday and I came home from work to find her and my husband happily weeding and pulling old leaves away from all the plants trying desparately to reach for the sun. We walked about my yard and, even though I had planted many of the perenials the year before I could not tell her what they were. There wasn’t enough of them visible for me to recognize them, even if I did happen to remember.
She knew. She knew even by the small amount of foliage. The size of the leaf, the color, the markings on the leaves all made perfect sense to her. To be honest, I nearly weeded a perenial because it looked like a weed. It wasn’t and thanks to my sister, the perenial’s life was spared.
For awhile, I thought there wasn’t much to gardening. I thought you could read the labels and plant stuff in the ground and then sit back and watch it grow. I understand I need to water but often forget and I do not enjoy weeding. I thought I could create the beautiful English garden like my sister or the pristine landscape like the one my sister-in-law has planted around her home.
But I do not have that talent. Last summer, I dug a large area out in our front yard, thinking how fabulous it would be to create another perenial garden. Three weeks later, my husband planted grass.
I do not have the vision or the understanding of the extensive array of annuals, perenials and shrubbery. I do not know when one thing will bloom and another will be done with that process. It is a gift, one I admire in both my sister and my sister-in-law.

It is a fact of life that we are not all good at everything. It would be absurd if we were. We would have no need for one another. We could teach ourselves to read and write and do math. We would nurse ourselves back to health. If we wanted a beautiful painting we would paint one.
If we wanted to read a book, we would write it. And sometimes even when you share the same interest with someone else, your talent within that will also be different.
My sister-in-law can build a landscape plan that blooms and blossoms for all seasons. My sister can grow sweet, beautiful carrots and her English-style garden is serene. I am glad I can look to them both for advice and seedlings when I want them.

And while I do enjoy digging up my yard, this year I will keep it to a patio project. We will put down bricks that won’t need to be weeded or watered. I will leave the true gift of gardening to my sisters and bask in their talent. And they can come sip wine on my patio.

Mother's Day

2012-06-14T10:25:00.001-07:00

Mother's Day

Mother’s Day is fast approaching. When I spoke with my sister this week she asked if we had special plans. The truth is no, since I am usually the planner of most things around our house it would be up to me to plan Mother’s Day.

If I did plan the day, it would consist of a drive and stops at various garden centers and shops and bookstores along the beautiful Connecticut River Valley. Three kids on such an adventure does not spell relaxation. It rather sets up all three for a day of complaining which would in turn make me wonder what had ever taken hold of me enough to have these kids in the first place. So my response was, ”nothing special.”

When my mother passed away six years ago, it took some of the steam out of Mother’s Day. There are times during the year her loss is felt more acutely and Mother's Day is one of them. After my mother had died, my cousin had described her father's death feeling like a hole left in her heart that gets smaller but never completely goes away. I understood exactly what she meant and on Mother's Day that hole expands.

My mother was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis before I was born. It was a fact in our house and nothing I had to adjust myself to. For my mother, I am sure it was much more than that. I am sure her life at times seemed daunting, that as a mother she wasn't quite living up to the expectation.
But as her daughter, my mother was just who she was, nothing more, nothing less. In the fourth grade, my sister, my mother and I were at my school for a parent/ teacher night. We walked down the hall, my sister pushing my mother’s wheelchair and I was walking along beside her, holding the arm rest of her chair. We passed one of my classmates.
He slowed down, smiled at me and kept walking, glancing back once as if he wasn’t sure if he was seeing straight. The next day he approached me and said, "Your mom can’t walk?” And I answered as any self-respecting fourth-grader would, "yeah, so?”
This encounter did not change how I saw my mother but it did make me realize that others saw her differently. That perhaps others felt sorry for her or our family. But those who knew her best did not waste their time on pity.
My mother was kind and organized, sweet and stern and she seemed to have a special part of her brain made out of a reinforced steel just for remembering things. She could recall phone numbers, dates and what I had said on the phone three years earlier to a friend about a cute guy who happened to — three years later — call me; and two years later marry me. I cannot remember to pick up milk without a reminder from my 3-year-old. Apparently, memory skips a generation.
My mother was gullible and fun and even as a teenager I often preferred her company over that of my peers. It never mattered to me that she couldn’t walk across a room, she was always present. She never missed a concert, play, banquet, graduation, wedding or baby shower. She always remembered birthdays and anniversaries. She was happy when we were happy. She worried when we were not. She tried to fix what she could and when she couldn’t she would tell us how wonderful we were and that things would get better.
I don’t remember from one Mother’s Day to the next what I gave her. I am sure in my early years there were homemade gifts, as my children bestow upon me each year. And I know in kindergarten I gave her anxiety when the gerbils I brought home from school for the weekend decided to practice some cannibalism.
And again in seventh grade when the pet rat I brought home from science class managed to escape his cage overnight. I am pretty sure I gave her some gray hair when I announced I preferred to not go to college but rather head to California like a free-loving hippie. But like all good mothers the small moments of anxiety and trauma never eclipsed the greater feelings of love and awe.
This year, I will love my homemade gifts and bask in the few moments that my children sing my praises before they move on to more important things like video games and fighting with one another. I will be thankful for the beautiful women in my life who help me steer the obstacle ridden pathway of motherhood.
I will remember my own mother who promised she would never leave me because she knew she would always be near in my children's laughter and my sister’s smile and my father's hug. I will know what a blessing motherhood is and what really matters is not what you offer physically but what you offer from your spirit.
Because that will travel with our children forever

Time After Time

2012-06-13T15:57:00.002-07:00

I have a dishwasher to empty, laundry to fold, four kids to feed, bags to pack and a race waiting for me tomorrow morning. I am not even close to getting any of that done. In fact if these kids were smart they would ask right now for lollipops for breakfast because they would get 'em!

I spent yesterday with my sister systematically going through our childhood home sorting,chucking, taking and musing over all the things my mother held dear. The items we stored away in the attic. The items packed away when something new came along to replace them. We found crystal and glassware and strange "knickknack " items . Some things neither of us want and some things we gave to one another. Some items we looked at and wondered why our mother had them in the first place. There is a pile big enough to fill Good Will in the garage. Clothes, stuffed animals,records with the funky 60's and 70's kaleidoscope of fashion and colors. My mother's hymns and gospel records. These fascincate me. They were played on a piece of furniture we had in our living room for years when I was growing up. It was practically the size of a couch and had knobs for dialing in all kinds of fuzzy radio stations and ear splitting whines when you hit a "non station". It was half record player and half radio. And it was probably all the rage in 1970. For many years I had to stretch up on my toes just to peer inside and make the record player move. It was during this time that the room was decorated in orange and vivid green and gold. The couch and small chair had the same pattern of orange and gold flowers with green for the viney stems and the loveseat was gold. This was the "good" room. The room that was used for company, parties, special occasions. It is where the Christmas tree was for most of my childhood, sitting poised in the large Bay Window so it could be seen from the sidewalk. Where our Easter baskets were left by the Easter Bunny.

As we are moving from room to room and picking out things we would like or taking photos off the walls, I can hear this symphony of voices swelling around me. I hear the adult laughter of my parent's friends during their parties and gatherings. I hear my Uncle telling yet another story from the childhood he shared with my mother and the way it made us all laugh even if we had heard that story just months ago at our last family gathering. I can hear my mother's voice calling me when she needed me or my father's stern voice calling out for me to turn out a light or TV from the last room I was in. I feel pummeled by nearly 20 years of memories.

My father kept busy with his grandchildren and keeping them out of our way. I am sure the distraction was welcome. Who could possibly watch 40 years of their life flash before them in the crystal stem ware and Christmas decorations. To me everything held a memory, or many at once. My sister was more pragmatic about it. One of us had to be. I get very caught up in the passage of time. I am not crazy about change. I like to return to things and have them be as I remembered and not as they are now. And going through so many things from my childhood and my mother's life and realizing how much time has moved like a swift current in a flooding river just set my teeth on edge.

As the cacophony of memories continued in my head and moments of complete meltdown over came me, there also came an understanding. A realization that time moves on because it is supposed to and change is good. That life is not meant to sit still. That we are not meant to sit still and stay the same. My mother loved her stuff and as hard as it was to say no to many things that I know she held dear. I came to understand that it was her stuff and she had her own reasons for loving it. I did take a few things that I loved about my childhood home. Things I can use now or things that remind me of growing up.

I think this is why I love photography. It takes a moment and freezes it. This works out very well for folks like me who need to grasp the past in order to understand the present. To be able to see into the eyes of someone who may not be here any longer and see life as they might have seen it. Because that's the thing about time no matter how hard we try to measure it,hold it and tie it down it keeps moving. It only moves forward with no repeats.

The closets are almost cleared in my father's house. The walls are almost bare but the wonderful thing about my life is the memories I can pull out at any moment no matter where I am.

2012-06-13T15:37:00.003-07:00

"Hey,Time I am Mom Enough"

So Time magazine has stirred the mommy war pot and the millions of moms who are doing their best and probably suffer from feelings of inadequacy on a good day can now look at the Time magazine cover while they place groceries on the belt, amid children screaming can now wonder if they have done something else wrong by not breastfeeding their child for three or four years.
It plays into the insecurities of moms everywhere. Moms are under enough pressure these days not to have to face a magazine cover screaming out, “Are you Mom Enough?”
I will say with all honesty I do not judge the woman on the cover. If she wants a child attached to her for that many years, good for her. And I would think it might take a bit of courage to put your face, and other body parts, to the theory of “attachment parenting.”
It is more her child I feel sorry for. If that boy child can make it through his college days without someone finding out he is that kid and blowing that photo up to a 20x30 and hanging it in a common area of his dorm, then he can count his blessings. Of course if this child were older, as I was told before seeing the article myself that he was four or five, then it might seem more offensive to some and just plain crazy to others.
Attachment parenting isn’t new. I read about it when I was pregnant more than 10 years ago and it wasn't new then. The phrase itself was penned by Dr. William Sears and what he basically states is that the more sensitive and emotionally available a parent is the better the child will develop into a socio-emotionally stable adult. The idea is to always be available for your children, handle them with kindness and compassion and a gentle hand. Most of the parents I know do this on a regular basis.
The website for Attachment Parenting International states eight components for attachment parenting. They seem like common sense to me: preparation for pregnancy, birth and parenting, feed with love and respect, respond with sensitivity, to name a few. But anyone could take any of the eight components, twist and turn and reorganize them until they look like the woman on the Time cover — extreme.
Women have enough coming at us on a daily basis. Magazine covers scream at us constantly. We shouldn’t have wrinkles or sagging skin, we shouldn’t gain weight. We should be home with our children, we should be feeding them home-cooked, organic, healthy meals three times a day. We should be teaching our children to read, write and add before they reach kindergarten all while keeping our houses organized and our marriages exciting and spontaneous.
Just thinking about all that is expected of me makes me want to crawl into bed and emerge when my kids go to college, which apparently they won’t if I don’t read to them 20 minutes a day, seven days a week beginning in utero.
If you had asked me 15 or 20 years ago what kind of mother I would be, I would have gleefully exclaimed, ”The Martha Stewart of all Mothers!” The baking, playing, cooking, smiling queen of motherhood. That was pre-sleep deprivation, pre-sore nipples, pre-baby fat (mine, not theirs) and definitely pre- “not tonight honey because it could result in another baby.”
I am not an “attachment mother” nor am I a Tiger Mom. I am not even sure I completely understand that whole concept. My own parenting style could probably be dubbed “bubble parenting.” I have decided the best way to handle motherhood is to do what works for us in our house. I no longer read articles about fabulously organized, PTO fundraising women who seem to not require any sleep at all.
I do not compare what I am doing, for better or worse, with other moms. I don’t ask about bedtime routines or feeding schedules or video game rules. I don’t read articles on how I could do what I am doing better. The information is too overwhelming and sometimes it just isn’t the right fit for our family.
We have tried some attachment parenting, mostly by accident, like letting our kids sleep in our bed, hoping just to get them to sleep only to have a terrible night ourselves being kicked or snored at. My father never let me sleep in my parents bed when I was scared or couldn't sleep. I do remind him of this particular flaw in his parenting quite regularly but despite that, I turned out pretty well-adjusted and he got plenty of sleep.
My husband and I have tried approaching our children gently when reprimanding but until they know that behind the gentleness is a parent who means business, your authority goes nowhere fast.
The truth of motherhood is it is a messy business. It is exhuasting and exhilarating and when you scrape it down to the very marrow, it is as individual as each person. No two women will come at it the same way. Some of us are shaped by what we had growing up and others by what they didn’t have. Some women have trouble letting go and some are fine with the progress of their kids and hardly look back beyond a wistful moment or two.
In the end, we all hope to raise happy, healthy children who grow into happy well-adjusted adults. So if you are wondering if I have read the Time magazine article the answer is no.
My children are way beyond being breastfed. And if you might be wondering if I consider myself “mom enough,” the answer is yes, I am mom enough on most days. And for now ignorance is bliss and I plan to stay in my parenting “bubble” and let the controversy swirl around me.
Because let’s face it, controversy sells and Time hit the motherload.

2012-06-13T15:35:00.002-07:00

My husband loves boats. He loves boats the way other men love football or golf.   I didn’t know when we first started dating exactly how deep his love of boating went, although it became clear pretty quickly when we went to our first boat show together. I was ready to call it a day after an hour or two but my husband couldn’t get enough. He would point excitedly to a boat and describe how that bow sits just a little higher.
I would squint and try to make my eyes see what he was seeing. I couldn’t but I would nod and smile and he would smile back, confident he had found the perfect woman to share his passion.
My next clue came almost a year later when we spent Memorial Day cleaning up his boat and getting her ready for the summer. It was a lot of washing and waxing and painting. It was hot that weekend. Record heat and there we were in a boat yard, sun pounding on the tops of our heads. We talked and laughed and he occasionally corrected my somewhat misguided attempts at proper washing and waxing technique.   I am hoping we drank some cold beer but truthfully I don’t remember.
Since we got married, a few boats have come and gone. That first boat was sold and a slightly larger, newer model took her place. He brought her home from New Jersey, one chilly October evening when I was eight months pregnant with our first child. Apparently October is the best time to buy a boat. I won't pretend that went over well with me but I think I'll blame it on the hormones.
We had that boat for a couple years and when we took our first born out on it he was about 20 months old and wanted no part of the life jacket. He screamed for the entire tour of the Connecticut River. He cried himself into exhaustion and my husband into despair. He thought now he would not have a fishing buddy.
That boat was sold after child number two came along. We were without a boat for a summer. I htink my husband might have cried himself to sleep a couple nights but search was on. Internet had taken hold and he could search all kinds of web sites. Ebay was a favorite but I think he also found a site called, “your wife will love this boat.com.”
He searched and found another boat that suited his needs for fishing since taking our young children out for an adventure wasn’t in my plan just yet. No one liked the life jacket and in our house no one sets off on a boating adventure without one. So a smaller boat came to live with us for awhile.
After that boat came another one that was larger and better for our growing family of five and made me happier because the sides were high enough to keep our small children from falling overboard.
While I was on that boat last summer, I commented on how it would be better to have a "potty." That is all I needed to say. The hunt was on. He looked long and hard and a few weeks ago our boat was pulled out of our driveway off to a new home and plans were made to bring home a slightly larger model with a “potty.”
Now it would seem we would have the perfect boat. It has been a bit of a journey but when someone has a passion for something it is best to give them some room.
We all have something that makes us tick. That gives us something beyond what our career may offer us and sometimes even what friends or family offer. It is important, I believe to have a passion. My husband has lived with my passion for books and writing all these years.
He has patiently wandered through bookstores and libraries. He has listened to my endless campaigns to get to one writer retreat or another. There is one that advertised in a writing magazine for a week in Tuscany, writing and retreating while eating and drinking. I have revisted that web site many times, thoughts of delicious food and wine pushing away daily chores of laundry and cleaning. It’s exciting just thinking about such an adventure.
I hunt out used book stores and library book sales. I go to writing workshops and author readings. He waves happily as I drive off to these various activities that mean little to him. He has also occasionally taken a back seat to a book I just couldn’t put down. He becomes a book widower and takes that in stride.
Last week when he and a good friend of ours pulled the new boat into her place in the driveway, both men stood looking at her as though she were the 8th Wonder of the World. These men share words like transom and horsepower.
They buy lures and have tackle boxes chock full of things that just look dangerous to me. These men come alive when the sun beats warm and the fish are plenty. And I will become a boat widow for the summer.
After our friend had left I went out to the driveway to find my husband and our 3-year-old sitting together in the boat, the orange sun setting over the bow, the music playing from the stereo and two faces glowing in pure bliss. Perhaps my husband has found the perfect boat and a fisherman to share his passion.
And perhaps for me there is a trip to Tuscany in my future.

Father's Day

2011-06-19T09:11:00.000-07:00

For my 40th birthday my sister gave me a trip with her to a very nice spot in the carribean. My husband was left to his own devices for five days. The morning I left, I got up at 5 am for a 7 am flight. No one was up when I left. I had left notes and detailed "reports" for my husband with everyone's weekday routine written down. Not that any of it was all unfamiliar since he is in charge each weekend when I go to work but having three kids by yourself for five days can feel a bit overwhelming when you haven't done it before.

I needn't have worried. He handled it like he handles just about everything else with some humor and a big grin. There is something about a guy who can just take on a challenge, no matter how big or small and just meet it with a smile. I am not sure how many husbands would smile and say," Sure go to a nice island in March for a week and leave me with three kids and have fun." And really mean it. Of course there were a few phone calls early the morning I left as I sat in the airport waiting for my flight. "What can I feed the baby for breakfast? What time does the bus come? Where is all the clean underwear?" I wrote it all down but who can blame him for not wanting to read it all. A woman sitting near me smiled after the third phone call and asked how many children he was alone with. I was tempted to say one just to see her reaction but I couldn't sell him out like that. I said three and gave their ages. Her face looked rather impressed.

A friend told me once she had read an article that women tend to find a husband who somehow mirrors the personality of their father. I am not sure how true that is. In the case of finances my husband and father couldn't be any more opposite. My father was not nicknamed "Dollar Bill" because he is a big spender. More so for the way he tightly clenches a dollar in his fist. My husband has no idea how to hold onto a dollar or even loose change. My dad likes a quiet day spent lounging, reading playing a little golf. My husband can hardly sit still. Over the years he has calmed his pace a bit but when we first started dating I had to beg for mercy, give me a day without something BIG planned or scheduled. To my husband a day that does not have three or more activities in it has been a lounging kind of day. My father might find that excessive.

So I had to give it more thought.

They both enjoy boating and fishing. A good glass of beer. But that is all superficial stuff. Most guys love a good cold beer and some version of fishing, trout , tuna. So I needed to dig deeper.

I thought back to my childhood and my father spending hours on the beach wtih me and my sister. Taking me out in the Sailfish around the Point. Trips to Watch Hill. I remembered the way our house morphed to suit the needs of my mother's disability and how it was jsut what it was adn then it came to me.

Devotion.

I managed to find a man who mirrored my father's devotion, committment to the words "I do". Both men are devoted fathers, caring and unyielding in their interest and support. My father loved my mother with a genuine heart and never let her down when she needed him most. My husband, although his challenge is keeping up with me mentally, still keeps pace and remains a devoted husband even at the most trying of times. They both give with a generosity of spirit that fills your soul and makes you realize they are paying attention and they love you.

I am not sure that we women try to find a man who resembles our fathers. That might just be too Freudian but if you find someone who loves you unconditionally, who navigates the bad with humor and finds the good at the end of each day then consider yourself fortunate. If you grew up with that same devotion then consider yourself blessed.

The Reward System

2011-04-13T04:30:00.000-07:00

A friend sent an article from The New York Times via email this morning. I read it and then went to another one written by the same journalist on happiness and kindness in our children. I found that one even more interesting. It talked about building self esteem in our children and how that is eclipsing creating kindness in our children. Forget about generation Z. Our children's generation will be known as the "all about me" generation. Our meals are planned around our children, as is our waking, our sleeping, our time alone or with our spouse. Our kids pout and we cave in, thinking we have just made some horrible mistake in a parenting choice and now our child will be ruined.

Sometimes saying no feels awful and, at least around here is it certainly repetitious. But there is a virtue to saying no. There is a silver lining to not caving in to everything. To not saying "okay sure you can have that toy for no other reason then to shut you up while I am in this store." It is just easier to take the easy way out but the more I see in my own children the
"give me" attitude the harder I am working to not give what is not necessary and to not use toys or treats as some kind of reward for things my kids should just be doing.

I recently had a meeting at my son's school. I meet once every couple months with his teacher, principal and some others involved in helping him improve his reading. It amazed me as I sat in this meeting and it went from academic discussion to discussion of his "fixation" on getting a "Good Choice Award". I had all I could do to not ask whose brilliant idea is the "Good Choice Award"? Because really you are rewarding children for being good people by giving them some treat from the dollar store. It only sets some kids up for disaster. My son received two good choice awards in one day and was so thrilled at his luck of getting two items from the principal's box of treats he talked about if for days at home. So I can understand why the teachers might have been a little frustrated if he was fixated but they have managed to create their own problem.

It is not that I think we shouldn't recognize our kids for the good things they do, but do they really need a trophy for participating in Saturday morning rec basketball? Will they be awarded when they are out in the workforce each time they do what their job description expects of them? Are we teaching them to be good citizens by rewarding them with dollar store goods or are we teaching them that being good brings rewards other than the feeling of satisfaction that they have done something good for another person.

As a kid I had chores and just did what I was told because, well I was told to do it. I did try to get out of doing those chores but once they were done there was no treat waiting for me or a trip to the store to pick out a toy. I was kind because it was expected of me adn because I watched my own parents and they way they treated people around them. We are our children's best teachers and if we teach them to do good things so they get a reward from it then we are not doing our job and our kids are really missing the greatest lesson.

My kids are completely wired for treats and rewards. They walk around the house with their hands held out in gleeful expectation. It is going to take a lot of work but I think we can change the way we do things at home and give our children the lesson that hard work and being kind has an internal reward that never stops giving.

My friend,the Librarian

2011-03-08T03:42:00.000-08:00

When I was growing up our town had a small library. It was a two story building wth the second sotry more or less the basement. The parking lot had about 5 spaces and if it was a busy time you had to park on the street. You walked down a ramp and into the building. To the left was the children's department and to the right was the small elevator and the narrows stairs leading to the adult area. The children's department was cramped, as I remember it. There were cinder block walls above the shelves of books. The windows were small and too high for me to reach or see out of. But that wasn't the point. I didn't need to look out on East Main street I was there for books. My father would take almost any time I wanted to go and it always seemed to me that Mrs P was sitting behind the desk. She was the kind of person who made you feel as though the library was made for you. She had suggestions on books and after a time would know what authors I liked best and would tell me when something new had come in. She introduced me to "Runaway Ralph." She stamped books with the return date and always had a smile. It stunned me then that she could be so happy working in a basement. I had not yet come to realize the thrill of sharing books. I was just learning the thrill of reading.

As I grew older I had to move to the upstairs to get my books and it never seemed as pleasant. The librarians seemed to me to be older and didn't smile nearly as much. As time went on a new library was built. It is a beautiful library. Large and spacious, light pouring in from all directions. Mrs P is still there handing out smiles and books to a whole new generation. Her smile is still the same even though the space has changed. For a time we lived close to that library and I chose it over the large city library where we lived. I walked into the city library and no one knew who I was. No one smiled in a friendly way, the whole atmosphere was out of sync with what I knew growing up.

When we moved out to the country, the first place I went was the library. I fell in love. It is small, but open and light filled and the librarians smiled and commented on the books or movies my young son picked out. It didn't take long for some of the librarians to call us by name when we came into the library.

Over the past fives years we have frequented our library weekly. The librarians know us by name, all three children now. One of those librarians reminds me of my friend Mrs.P. I had quite an over due fine recently , which sadly is the norm not the excpetion for me. I walked into the library and smiled at Mrs.L. She smiled back and said,"What did you do now?" Relief flooded me because really I am , or at least it seems to me, always "doing something" that causes someone else to pick up my slack or help me along the way. But when she said it it was not with frustration but with that same smile she has given me and my children for the last five years. When I explained my dilemma of being unable to unearth four books she looked through the stacks and then renewed what she could and I paid the bill. On the way out she asked if my son had any more bags he might hide his books in and I had a thought. He has many bags adn he likes to hoard thing. We may show up on one of those shows one of these days. But it gave me a thought to look under the back seat of our SUV, a place I really try not to frequent and sure enough there were the books.

Librarians are special people. They are a public servent that most of us probably take for granted or may not even give much thought to what they do. But for me my love of books grew out of a small basement and a special woman with a big smile and has remained because of the other special librarians I have found along the way.

Compost how I love thee

2011-03-06T17:06:00.000-08:00

I can see grass. My lawn is appearing after a very long hiatus. I am happy to see some dark green through the grey snow. I can see where my perenial gardens have been sleeping. The snow receded overnight to reveal shovels,sleds and some miscellaneous objects that don't belong on the yard. Our garden fence took a beating and needs more then just some simple repairs. The weight of the snow collapsed the tree trunks that my husband so carefully placed. It looks sad and battered but my husband has already drawn a new plan for this years crops and some seeds have already been bought. A new fence will be in place soon. I passed the garden center on my way to work this weekend and their door was open, not open for business but I can tell it is near. It is March and the rhythym of spring is bouncing in my veins.
My compost bin,which has been devoured by snow since January has been discovered. I had forgotten exactly where it was. My counter bucket just reappeared on the back porch where I eveidently left it before that first storm. It has been cleaned out and returned where it belongs. I hate to admit it but I have not composted this winter. It has been impossible for me to muster the stamina to get to the bin in the backyard. It required too much preparation. Boots, gloves,hat, coat, scarf. It is just like dressing your kids to play outside and having them back in the house in five minutes. Not quite worth all the effort. I did throw many things out into the backyard ,hoping some animals who were scrounging for food would help themselves, but for those of you who don't compost this is not a standard or recommended practice. All I can see now are some very fat squirrels barely able to run through my yard.
This morning I can see more of yard then I have seen since January. There was a layer of fog only seen in a bad B movie, hovering just slightly above the ground. The snow is melting at an incredible clip and the air smells sweet. The metallic smell of winter has faded. I have pulled my gardening gloves from their resting place to replace my winter gloves. My wool hat has been exchanged for the billowing spectacle known as my "shade hat" My Wellies are standing at attention next to my rake. My snow shovel is put away and my flat garden shovel ready to make a new garden in the coming weeks. I can taste the sweetness of food grown in my backyard and smell the tender air that will surround my honeysuckle bush.
My compost is back in business. My counter bucket is full this morning and ready to be placed among the other scraps that will work their magic, turning peels and coffee grinds into sweet smelling soil that will give us another round of cucumbers,eggplant and tomatoes. The walk is easy now, I don't even need a coat and who doesn't love sloshing through the mud?
For those naysayers who say snow could still come, I'm sorry I can't hear you. There are some birds chirping in my ears and I am blinded by the bliss I see just around the corner.

A Moment of Silence: Day One

2011-01-31T13:41:00.000-08:00

My children have been home from school for a week now. I won't go into the gory details. We all have our stories, don't we? Last week I was watching Oprah and she and Goldie Hawn were talking about finding true happiness. What in life makes us happy. Oprah swears having time alone and being quiet will raise you up, bring inner peace, be good for your spirit. Dropping my kids off at her house for a week would bring me some inner peace. But since I cannot do that, I decided I would try some silence.
So for my first attempt I did as Oprah suggested I locked myself in the bathroom.
5:05 pm Shut bathroom door.
5:05 pm Knock at the door and it opens, thought I locked it.
Cooper: "Mom why are you sitting on the toilet all dressed?"
Me: "Please shut the door!"
Cooper: "okay but can you get me a drink? I haven't had one for all day." Sticks his tongue out to show me just how dehydrated he really is.
One millisecond later:
Drake "MOM! MOM! Where are you?"
ME:
Drake: "MOM!? " Door opens and a surprised 8 year old stares. "What are you doing sitting on the toilet like that?"
ME: "Privacy! Can I have some privacy in my own bathroom?"
Drake "Okay but you're doing it wrong. And can you tell Cooper to leave me alone? He keeps bothering me, saying stuff like..."
I get up and shut the door on him. I can hear him still talking through the door but it is muffled enough that I pretend not to hear. I look at my watch I have spent a minute in the bathroom and I have succeeded in having one millisecond of silence. I think Oprah asked for just one minute a day. She said give her just one minute. I guess she really doesn't know how long a minute can be in a house with three kids. Oh well there is always tomorrow...

"Tell me ,again, why you're running?"

2010-09-14T10:24:00.000-07:00

I was recently complaining to an acquaintance but training for this half marathon. Not someone who knows me very well, but someone who was willing to listen to how much fun training is not. All she said when I was done was,"So tell me why you are running?" The simple answer is because I can. If we wanted to break it down and analyze it further and perhaps make it more interesting I could confess of the deep need for my children to see me in action. To see all of my limbs moving. To witness strength and capability on a physical level emanating from their mother. Something I never got see in my own mom. There is a power to moving your body beyond limitation. Beyond what you thought it was capable of. I want my children to always know I tried and to know that they must also try. Of course right now my children are too young to grasp anything beyond, " Mom likes to run with her friends." Which is s good start.

Each mile I run sparks something new inside me. Another goal becomes within my reach. It is something like that song,"This Little Light of Mine." Sometimes all we need is one shaft of light that blows away the darkness, gives us just enough of an outline to show us that the coat hanger isn't a monster and we have nothing to fear. One of my friends recently ran five miles and was telling me how great she felt afterward. I smiled and responded,"It's empowering, isn't it?" Her own smile tilted and grew and she said," Yes, it really is!" And that is just what it is, empowering. It never felt that way in my twenties and certainly not in my "Kermit" teens. Running was just something to do. Now it feels symbolic, large. I may never run another half-marathon and I can almost guarantee I won't run a marathon, training sucks the fun out of running. But it has made me realize that the only thing that stops us from dog anything, trying anything is ourselves.

When I wake up in the morning and feel tired and tell myself it is going to be bad day or a long day it is like Samantha Stevens has wiggled her nose and made it so. My oldest will miss his us, my husband will forget something important and will need me to bring it to his office, my toddler will only my attention and my four year old will want to finger paint..on my walls. I will discover I have nothing for dinner and no clean underwear. It's enough to make you want to go back to bed and stay there until you can start over with a new sunrise. I was explaining this to some of my mommy friends like this," If I have to take all three kids to Target I just tell myself it is going to be fine and they will behave." It works much better than telling myself how awful it will be because she enough that is what happens. I told them to try it. They all smiled but their eyes said, "You're crazy."

I met another woman a few days ago who is running the same half marathon. She is already up to 11 miles. When I told her I was at 9 miles her eyes sort of bulged and for moment I thought she had some food stuck in her throat. Then I realized she was just shocked that I was so far behind. I started to panic. Perhaps she is right. My training has been anything but regular. I have tried but with three kids, working every weekend and my husband also training it is almost impossible to stick to any kind of strict routine. Not to mention I don't really care for routines. She is at 11 miles. I'm at 9 and my thighs hurt, my knees hurt even my gluteus maximus feels maxed out. How will I make it to the finish line? It was at that moment that I realized I was sinking myself before I even got to the starting line. I was talking myself out of something that I can do. I m running because I can. I am running because it empowers me. I am running because my gluteus maximus has never looked better.

I may take a long time to reach the finish line but waiting there for me will be three little people who won't know how long it took or what it means to me. They will have a memory of a moment when their mom was strong and healthy and ran breathless to them, while they all pointed to the bounce house and Dunkin Donut booth begging for Munckins.

So we can take the pyschologist approach to my running and break it down and beat it like an old rug, spreading dust in a thousand directions and forgetting where it all came from or we can keep it simple and say," I am running because I can."