Nice

In my freshman (and only) year of college, I had a well-respected professor named Dr. Mayo. I'm sure he taught me many things in his English class, but the only thing I really remember is about the word nice. He absolutely detested that word. He thought it didn't say anything worth saying. He considered it bland, empty, void. He said there are thousands of other words which would be more appropriately used in any conversation. I was so intrigued by his vehemence that I made sure I found a birthday card for him with "Have a Nice Birthday" written across the front.

Ever since then, I have had inklings that I was just too nice sometimes. I was taught to be nice when I was a child. In spite of Dr. Mayo's portrayal of nice as without meaning, I think it is very clear. Nice is polite. Nice is to think of others before yourself. Nice is quiet, unassuming, pleasant. Nice does not make waves, and most of all, nice is holding your tongue.

Family members might laugh at the last definition, for in my case, I doubt they realize that I ever hold my tongue. But I do, in situations outside the family. At work, for instance. I realize others are taking advantage of me, and I just continue to do my job (the difficult along with the easy) and just simmer. Sometimes I hear an offensive "joke" and don't speak up. Sometimes I see injustice and sit on my hands rather than complain. That is the "dark" side of nice. It's because I am one of those women they call G.R.I.T.S. (Girls Raised In The South). We're taught to be nice. It's in our genes.

Of course, you have a loophole twice in life - once when you're very young, and once when you're very old. Then you can speak your mind, because everyone expects it. Indeed, they laugh at it. As adults, we're afraid to proclaim, "The emperor has no clothes!" because it's not nice to speak your mind, even when it's just being honest.

This week I thought of two females in my family who were and are in the loophole stage. I got to see my granddaughter, Caroline, along with her 5-month-old sister, Charlotte. Caroline speaks her mind. You never know what will pop out of her mouth.

The situation was Charlotte's dirty diaper. (I heard of a Baby Weede whose dirty diapers were legendary, but this one came pretty close). The mess had traveled, encompassing the area of her belly, her back, even up by her shoulders. It was everything you could wish for in a dirty diaper. Rachel asked for my help. "Hold her hands," she told me, "so I can change the diaper without her touching it." I did as I was told, but even that wasn't enough. She called her husband. "Chris! I need you!" Chris was saying as he came into the room, "What? Two people aren't enough to change a diaper?" He soon found out that we were not dealing with an ordinary dirty diaper. So Chris held Charlotte's legs, I held her arms, and Rachel was trying desperately to do the deed. It was a scene worthy of a picture, but no one had free hands to get the camera.

Apparently when Charlotte has a dirty diaper, Caroline always wants to see it up close and personal. She took the little nursing stool, moved it over to the changing table, stood on it and craned her neck to see over the rail. She said nothing. I asked her if she could see OK, and she nodded. Finally, she got down. At this point, Chris remarked, "This is just too much here for a wipe. I'm going to get a wash cloth." And Caroline popped up, "Don't get one of MINE!" No altruism for her in this case. She knew what that wash cloth was headed for and she didn't want any part of her wash cloth collection involved.

It reminded me of the second female I mentioned, Aunt Bessie. Aunt Bessie could speak her mind because she was country-bred and old. She had two loopholes. Years ago, my family was sitting down to dinner to a plate of strange stuff. My mom was making hamburgers, but when she started, she realized she was out of hamburger buns. Oh, but she had hot dog buns. She just shaped the hamburger meat to look like hot dogs. Then they would fit the buns and everything would be great. I don't think she even realized what a plate of hot-dog shaped ground beef would look like until it was all in a brown pile. The plate was set in the middle of the table. We all stared. No one said anything - except, of course, old Aunt Bessie. She smirked.
"Jean, do you know what that looks like?" she said.
We all could guess what was coming. After all, Bessie was right. It did look like that.
"Yes, Bessie," said Mom, obviously hoping to drop the whole conversation.
"But do you really know what it looks like?" Bessie repeated.
By this time, the rest of us were stifling giggles.
"Yes, Bessie," said Mom, a little impatient. "I know what it looks like."
"Well," said Aunt Bessie, "it looks like...."

If you are hoping that Aunt Bessie's voice just dropped off at that point, sorry. You know better than that. Aunt Bessie said The Word. A word that was never said in our house. Ever.

Did the roof collapse? Did my parents faint? No. After all, Aunt Bessie was old. Everyone expected the unexpected when it came to Aunt Bessie. The meal continued without incident, and we all ate those misshapen burgers without other comment. The story, though, landed in our family collection of Stories Worth Remembering.

So here I am, 51 years old, and I fit neither category of loopholes. I am still nice. I know what's socially appropriate. Now I just have to learn that in some cases, nice will have to fall by the wayside, and the chips will fall where they may. This is not about any one situation; it is a part of my personality that I think needs to be adjusted. I don't like to speak up. I don't like to make waves. I certainly fear that people won't "like" me. Just one more hard thing about middle age. Sometimes life is just full of....

And yes, my last remark will fade into the Internet without being voiced. Even a reformed Girl Raised In The South has her limits.

Holding...holding

It was either a mistake or a godsend for me to start posting about songs. After I reminisced about Jeanette MacDonald, I visited iTunes to see if they offered any of her music. And there it was - Italian Street Song from "Naughty Marietta." If you read my previous post, you can read the lyrics. They're nonsensical and look pretty ridiculous without the music to accompany them, but I posted them anyway.

So I spent my $.99 to download the song. It was as thrilling as I remembered! Her gorgeous voice soars over the orchestra effortlessly. She could really hit those high notes. In particular, there is one high note right at the end of the song, the next-to-last note. You can tell the song is about to end, that she is probably ready to hit the final note, and you wait. And wait. She is still singing the high note. You wait some more.

By this time, in the olden days of record players, you probably would think the record was "stuck." It seems impossible for a human being to hold such a high note for that long a time. I know that we live in a era of impatience, in a society that demands everything fast and immediate - but even that could not explain my uneasiness at hearing her hold that note. The whole time I was waiting, thoughts were racing through my head. Is it possible to hold a note that long? Did my download have a glitch? Was she turning blue in the face, a visual scene that I missed because I only had the audio experience?

Finally - and I do mean FINALLY - she released the note with great fanfare, her voice sliding down to the very last note, with the orchestra madly dashing about ecstatically to carry the song to its dramatic conclusion.

That was one of the longest few seconds I have ever spent! I realized I had even been holding my breath while she was holding that high note. Whew! I took a deep breath and relaxed.

It didn't take long before I could see the whole experience as a metaphor for our house situation. We cleaned, we stored, we packed, we staged, we put the house on the market, and we had showings. With great anticipation, we knew we were approaching that high note, and from the first showing on, we have held that high note. We can't end the song until the house is sold; we can't build the new house until the house is sold. In short - we are holding the high note, and, my friends, I can assure you our collective face is the color of one of Maine's ripe blueberries.

How I want to relinquish the high note, beautiful though it may be, and end the song in a flurry of violins and drums and trumpets and cymbals! I know we will be involved in many other "songs" in our lives, and we'll be starting another one soon after we finish this one, but oh, please, please - we need to finish this song!

There's only so long a person can hold a high note like that. Even the great Jeanette MacDonald had to release it sooner or later.

Noteworthy

Ever since I wrote about The Hokey Pokey, I have had my head swimming in songs. Do you realize that the only way to get one song out of your head is to think of a different song? And I certainly have a wide collection of tunes to choose from. I've been involved in music my whole life, from singing to piano to organ to harp.

One of the magazines I read has a column titled "My Life in..." and in each issue, a new celebrity finishes that phrase with her own list. "My Life in Shoes," for instance. The featured celebrity makes a chronological list of her life in shoes and the importance thereof. The magazine then provides pictures of the shoe styles she writes about. She not only lists her shoe styles; she also reminisces about the time in her life when she was wearing each pair, and how and why her shoes reflected these important stages in her development as a woman. I remember one month it was "My Life in Lipsticks." It's hard to imagine how that can be at all interesting, but they managed to turn that particular story into an amazingly engrossing read.

So after The Hokey Pokey finally exited my brain, I did some reminiscing myself. I wonder how I would write a column called "My Life in Songs."

Every once in awhile I'll catch an infomercial on TV with another new release of a song collection. Sometimes they will even say, "These are the songs of your life!" They never are the songs of my life. The songs of my life are not usually popular - they are sometimes not even well known at all - but I can easily trace their importance for me.

Some of the first songs I was introduced to were my parents' favorites, of course.
"Pony Boy." Ever heard of it?
Pony Boy, Pony Boy, won't you be my Tony Boy?
Don't say no. Here we go off across the plains.
Marry me, carry me right away with you.
Giddy up, giddy up, giddy up, whoa! My Pony Boy.

We only knew the chorus, but I found the whole song on the Internet with all the lyrics and music here. It's a great song if you want to be cheered up! "Pony Boy" was usually paired with this ditty:

Cheyenne, Cheyenne

Hop on my pony

There's room here

For two dear

And after the ceremony

We'll both ride home as one, as one

On my pony from old Cheyenne.

Of course, my parents were fans of Nelson Eddy and Jeanette MacDonald. (I only found out a few years ago that I was named after Jeanette MacDonald.) So the song "Totem Tom Tom" was in our childhood repertoire, as well as "Italian Street Song." Here's the chorus to the latter:

Zing, zing, zizzy, zizzy, zing, zing,

boom, boom, aye.

Zing, zing, zizzy, zizzy, zing, zing

Mandolinas gay.

Zing, zing, zizzy, zizzy, zing, zing

boom, boom, aye. La, la, la, ha, ha, ha, Zing, boom, ay.

La, la, la, la, ha, ha, ha zing, zing, aye.

Now those aren't your average lyrics - but oh what fun to sing!

I can't forget "Let Me Call You Sweetheart." We only knew the choruses of so many of these songs, and it is a delight to do a little research and see the rest of the lyrics. You can hear this song at this site.

Then there's the ever popular song guaranteed to get sleepy kids to wake up in the morning (along with a cold damp washrag on the eyes):

When the red, red robin comes bob bob bobbin along, along,
There'll be no more sobbin' when he starts throbbin' his own sweet song:
Wake up, wake up! you sleepy head,
Get up, get up, get out of bed,
Cheer up, cheer up, the sun is red,
Live, love, laugh and be happy...

Those are just from my childhood. Later in life, I sang, "His Eye is on the Sparrow" at my grandmother's funeral. I sang "Be Thou My Vision" at my dad's funeral. Around the time we got married, Ed and I saw the original Poseidon Adventure - and first heard the song "There's Got To Be a Morning After" - which I immediately adopted as "our song." Unfortunately that designation has never been accepted by Ed, who personally dislikes the song, and every time we hear it, I swoon and he just rolls his eyes. One of these days, it will grow on him.

There are many other songs of my life, too many for a column in a magazine, too many for a blog, too many for me even to remember. But my soul is infused with them all. And that is indeed what it is all about!

Hokey Pokey

I'm up again, blogging in the middle of the night. A hot flash woke me up. Those of you who have never experienced a hot flash can consider yourselves lucky. Maybe by the time Caroline hits menopause, science will have discovered a cure without side effects or ominous warnings. But for now, I'm stuck with them.

After my hysterectomy in 1994, I was placed immediately on hormonal therapy and so avoided the dreaded hot flashes. I continued that way for over a decade. By last year, though, I had been persuaded by my doctor that it was time to relinquish the crutch, so to speak, so I went cold turkey. I didn't really know what to expect with my estrogen withdrawal, and although I quizzed my older acquaintances for information and was given hints about what was to come, I quickly learned that the whole scenario is something you can't appreciate unless you've experienced it firsthand. One of my co-workers told me, "My mother always used to say when she had a hot flash that she could have run out in a blizzard naked." Well, we did have a little April snow shower today, but a blizzard it was not, and besides, I'm not quite that desperate. Nevertheless, hot flashes are annoying. And the ones in the middle of the night are the most frustrating - because then it's "kick the covers off" time.

If you sleep with another human being, you know what effect this can have. When a hot flash wakes me up, I need relief, and I need it immediately. Now, it's hard to kick a sheet, blanket, quilt, and top wool blanket off completely in one fell swoop, so I usually just throw the top blanket over onto Ed, then pull my left leg (my outside leg) out from under the rest of the covers and lay it on top of everything to get the cool room air to at least one of my lower limbs. I do this at the same time that I throw off what covers I can from my shoulders and chest area. Believe me - it is quite a feat to be able to accomplish this in a fraction of a second while I'm still half asleep. It takes coordination, persistence, and practice. I have it down to an art. As the heat recedes, my exposed skin gets chilled, and I reverse my maneuver and replace all my assorted body parts back under the covers. Of course, all this does maximal damage to a good night's sleep for Ed.

Tonight when I performed my acrobatics, I woke up just enough that my brain wouldn't easily return to sleep, and all I could hear in my head were the lyrics to that song, The Hokey Pokey. "You put your left leg in, you put your left leg out..." There are songs that pass through your brain like a short excursion train trip from one place to another - a pleasant diversion. There are other songs that stay in your head like the miniature train sets you see under Christmas trees - they go in a circle around and around and never end. The Hokey Pokey is definitely in the latter category.

As I was writing this blog entry, I wanted to reference the lyrics to The Hokey Pokey so I clicked on a pertinent web site. Immediately the song started blaring - and my speakers were up to full volume, of course. It startled me, but not as much as it startled Ed, who was sleeping in the next room. Sorry, Ed - that's what it's all about.

Boiling a Frog

As I mentioned recently, I've been reading Organizing for the Spirit by Sunny Schlenger. It doesn't relate to organizing as much as it relates to quality of life in general. One example in particular caught my attention. I had heard it before, but needed to hear it again:

It's so easy to become habituated to the pace of our lives. We get used to the ever-increasing speed of things and think this is the way life has to be. But you may recall the story of the frog and the boiling water. If you put a frog into a pan of boiling water, it will, of course, jump out. The frog is not an idiot, and the water is too darn hot for it to stay in there. But if you put a frog into a pan of cool water and turn up the heat gradually, the frog will boil to death, because he gets used to the water becoming gradually hotter and isn't aware that he's getting cooked until it's too late.

Ms. Schlenger continues: "There's a lesson here. Not until we get out of our pan for a minute do we realize what it's been costing us just to stay in that place." She is referring in part to getting out of one's routine and stepping back for breaks and new perspective, but, as usual, I interpret her words through my personal filter - my experience and my situation. To me, that statement and story speaks of acquisition and our ever-expanding lifestyles.

Folks our age were taught that to "make it" in the world required work, yes - but the evidence of having "made it" was things - clothes, cars, houses, private schools for your kids (then prestigious universities), a great career where you are constantly moving up, and the latest technology like cool cell phones and wide-screen TVs. We start out in this mindset. After all, our parents wanted us to live better off than they did. So we get a bigger house with more bathrooms, more expensive cars and clothes. It really adds up, and it does so gradually. Unlike the lottery winners who go to town with lavish spending the day after their check comes, an upwardly mobile lifestyle sneaks up on us. And like the frog, we don't even realize it until it's almost too late. We wake up one day, look around, and exclaim, "Where did all this STUFF come from?!" From years of buying and accumulating. From spending money we did have, and some we didn't have (ah, credit cards!).

Some of our generation's acquisitions would be almost laughable if we took time to think about it. Expensive clothes that are out of fashion in a year or two. Technology that's outdated in, say, a week or two! The latest in small appliances and gadgets that cost more to repair than to throw away.

In my case, I can add clothes patterns I never sewed, and cross-stitch patterns I never started. I can even count the little things, like shampoo bottles that I quit using before they were empty. I'm sure you have your own list. We are certainly an acquisition society as well as a wasteful society.

What I'm saying is that it's easy to get complacent about acquisition. Some things, like the aforementioned schools, may end up as an investment and pay off one day. Other things are clearly just spending mistakes because we were caught up in the moment. And suddenly, we wonder why the cold water has turned so hot that we have no energy to jump out.

I guess we really end up in those Mastercard ads. We take a good look at our lifestyle and all our "things" that cost money. Then we realize how much money we spent on those things. "New dress: $100. New car: $18,000. Dinner out for 5: $60." But thank goodness it doesn't end there. "Wonderful children and precious grandchildren, devoted spouse, loving sister, selfless elderly mother in good health, legacy of a remarkable father: Priceless."

When we learn it's the priceless things that are the most important, we have arrived.

Family in Motion

More magazine is a publication directly focusing on women over 40. I have a subscription, but for some unknown reason yesterday I visited their web site. One thing caught my eye.

"Survey for Empty Nest Moms. Social psychologist Carin Rubenstein is writing a book on how women feel about their children leaving home. If your children are over age 18, click to respond to her survey."

How intriguing! Well, since I fit the parameters, I took the survey.

My first problem was deciding on a definition of a child having "left home." Is that when she goes to college? Gets married? When does one exactly "leave home"? My children left home gradually. Once they started college, they still kept our house as home base, but their visits were fewer and less extended. For a few years, they came here for the summer. Then they moved out of the dorm into apartments. Marriage finally made the whole thing official. It's not just one day we're the 4 of us, then the next day we're 3, then the next day, 2. It was a process. We could see our lives changing. Heck, we expected our lives to change. Kids grow up and leave home. It's the way of nature; it's the way of the world. Thank goodness it does happen gradually, though. It helps the poor parents to make emotional peace with the idea.

College was certainly step one. Because the university our children attended is only an hour away, it didn't feel so much as if they were leaving home. And thanks to cell phones and e-mails, and - yes - Internet chat, we stayed in frequent contact. We kept their rooms in the house just as they left them. Our house was still their house; after all, one can't really consider a dorm room "home." They kept their house keys so they could come by if we weren't here. They were still dependents on our income tax. Yes, the umbilical cord was still intact.

Closer to college graduation, we could see that that cord was becoming a little wobbly. It was love, of course. The beginning of the end of our family unit. After all, they were adults now, and they were thinking about their futures. Rachel was doing student teaching, coming off a broken engagement, when she met the man who was to become her husband. It wasn't long before his house became more of a home to her than our house. Her marriage in 2002 cinched the deal. One child had definitely left home. One umbilical cord had been severed.

Well, OK, we still had Matt. But we knew it was inevitable that he would leave, too. I think Ed sensed it first. Ed would shed a few tears every time Matt came home. Everything reminded him of Matt. Every tool that he couldn't find, he blamed Matt for losing it. (Do you remember Alvin and the Chipmunks? It was just like yelling "AAAALVIN!") But he would never stay upset for long. He would just sigh. It was little things like that.

Then it happened. Matt too fell in love. The times he spent here in this house meant his body was here, but his heart and mind were with Sarah. Engagement and marriage followed. Leaving his wedding , I remember thinking, "We're really empty-nesters now."

The More magazine quiz wanted me to describe how I felt when the kids "left home." Was I anxious? Sad and depressed? Relieved? Joyful? Unfortunately, they didn't have a choice marked "all of these." We went through every emotion during the gradual change in our family unit. We were anxious about their futures, we were sad that they had grown up and would miss them being around, we were relieved that they had turned out to be well-adjusted, functioning adults, and we were so happy they had found true love and married people that we respect and love, too. All the above.

I didn't have to give up being a parent. I didn't look around after the house was empty and say, "Who am I?" or have some kind of identity crisis. Because my love for my children transcends time and distance. I know they are cared for by their spouses, and I know they are building their own families. It is as it should be. I gave each kid the pre-marriage lecture about the fact that their loyalties were now primarily to their new spouse first.

Rest assured, their spirits are still here in this house. Especially when Ed can't find his drill.

Why, indeed?

I must have a special affinity for adverbs. Asking the "why, when, where, how?" has led me to read exclusively nonfiction. While everyone around me discusses the latest popular novel, I am plodding through books like Organizing for the Spirit.

My late friend Bernie used to say, "I don't have to read romance novels. My life is a romance novel!" Maybe that's why I don't need to read a lot of fiction. My life has been a novel in itself!

Caroline, my precious little granddaughter who will soon turn 3, has entered the "why?" stage. It can be frustrating for the grown-ups, but she entertains us so well that one can't help but be amused. Yesterday I sat with her at Borders while her mom and her baby sister Charlotte shopped for books. Caroline and I sat down on the step and read one book after another. When it was time to go, I told her I would buy her one $4 book. She narrowed it down to a Lazytown book (from one of her favorite TV shows) and a Thomas the Train book. She finally decided on Thomas the Train and we paid for the book and continued on our way.

Last night I got a call from Caroline.
"Grammy," she said, "did you take the Lazytown book home to your house?" (She is well aware that we keep at least 40 books here for her to enjoy while she is visiting us.)
"No, honey," I replied. "I didn't buy that book."
"Why didn't you buy the book?"
At this point, I settled back in my chair. "Remember, you said you wanted Thomas the Train?" I reminded her.
Caroline paused for only a second. "But why didn't you buy the Lazytown book?"
I chose the simplest and truest answer. "Because I didn't have the money."
"Why didn't you have the money?"
Oh, let me count the ways...the plumber, the electrician, the doctor, the oil company...
"Because I had to spend money on other things."
I was surprised that that answer seemed to satisfy her.

I ask myself "why?" every time I have a weird dream. Like last night. Ed got up early this morning and at 8:00 I shuffled into the living room in my nightgown and well-worn housecoat. I threw myself into the nearest chair. "I had a nightmare," I said dejectedly.
Ed was tending the fire, but turned and asked, "Oh? About what?"
"It was about a horrible grammatical error that I made in a letter."
Ed predictably rolled his eyes. "Oooh," he said, "that would terrify me too!"

It was a horrible nightmare. I dreamt that I had written an important letter (to whom, I don't recall) and after it was sent, I realized that, instead of typing "friend of theirs," I had typed "friend of theres's." Ouch. It's hard for me to type it like that right now. It stings my eyes; it weakens my fingers. Then in the dream, when I realized my horrid and completely unforgivable mistake, I typed another letter to clarify that I hadn't meant to type "theres's" and that I knew better than that, and then I begged the recipient to find the original letter and burn it, shred it, or similarly destroy it so that no traces of my temporary insanity would remain. I woke up in a cold sweat.

When I finished my story of deepest shame, I could swear Ed was laughing.

So again I ask myself why my subconscious would torture me so. I think it relates to the house-selling situation - as I assume everything does these days. I think I feel helpless in so many facets of my life during this time of uncertainty that I want to stand on the only solid ground I have - my punctuation, spelling, and grammar. To lose that would be to lose my identity, in a way. It is something I can control, and by gum, I will control it!

OK, so it's not your usual run-of-the-mill nightmare. Welcome to my world.

Potential

While I was a model student, my husband Ed was quite the opposite. While I excitedly anticipated report card time, Ed was apathetic. He claims he wasn't even smart enough to dread it. (When he was in seminary, he was finally diagnosed with a form of dyslexia; too bad his teachers didn't know about it, because that explains a lot.)

Anyway, Ed kept enough of his report cards to entertain me and the kids. His teachers would write comments on each report card, and one comment appeared consistently: Eddie is not working up to his potential. We laugh about it now, but I imagine comments like that can work two ways - they can give you hope that you can do better, or they can discourage you from ever trying, knowing that you will never quite get there. Unfortunately, little Eddie ended up with the latter attitude.

I keep hoping someone will see the potential in this house. It's an old house, not without flaw by any means, and there is not a perfectly straight patch of floor in the whole place. But it has stood the test of time and, as someone once said, it has "good bones." Some people will come in here and say it needs too much work. Others see the potential.

I wish, for instance, we had been able to refinish the old wood parquet floors. I imagine they would have looked brilliant! But alas, we are not experienced floor refinishers, and there are some tasks we just can't tackle. (After all, Ed finally hung those kitchen cabinet doors - what more can we expect?) So there are two possible attitudes: "Oh, those floors need to be refinished. What a burden! What work! What money!" or.... "Oh, those floors should be refinished. Can you imagine their beauty when we do that? They don't make floors like that anymore!"

How do you sell a house's potential? How can we convince prospective buyers that we have improved the house since we bought it, and now it's time for someone else to leave their mark? I have this recurring vision that if each owner of the house makes improvements, this Grand Old Victorian Lady will one day reach her potential.

This time of year is a hard season to sell a house in Maine, even though it is officially the most productive house-selling season. The temperatures are still cold, the ground is still frozen (until it thaws, hence Mud Season). The trees which in summer block sometimes unappealing views of neighboring houses are now bare. With no green grass, everything is brown. The daffodils and other flowers that Ed has planted in the last few years are still dormant.

Autumn brings color and beauty to our part of the world, and in the dead of winter, we have a smooth blanket of snow covering all the yard. Summer is filled with soft breezes, mild temps, and endless blossoms. But now....sheesh!

I want someone to come for a showing who can look at the yard and see it with "summer" eyes. Someone who can see the potential for landscaping and gardens, and a yard and porch just made for hammocks and lawn chairs. I want someone to fall in love with the house as we did, someone who senses its history and presence, who understands that old houses have character and charm, and that these things make up for the extra time, money, and energy needed to care for them. I want them to understand that we are ready to pass on to them a most precious possession, full of memories and life and love. And I want them most of all to see its potential, and unlike little Eddie, realize that they have the power to bring "potential" into existence.

Ripples

"How long after you are gone will we realize the ripples you left in the pool of life?"
Such is a paraphrase of a quote I saw on the obituary page of our local newspaper this week. I would like to have had the direct quote, but alas, we have already taken our recycling in.

A Google search along the same lines led me to this quote:

"Man is but a pebble, thrown into the pool of life. A splash, a bubble, and it vanishes. But the ripple that it causes grows wider and wider 'till it reaches the far bank." (Sir Thomas More)

As I have posted before, I read the obits regularly. In the past, I lived in cities where newspapers were published daily; here, it is weekly. That is unfortunate, because there have been several occasions where an acquaintance of ours has died and had their funeral before we even heard anything about it. Still, I guess my interest in the obituaries stems from being a pastor's wife and the experiences thereof, as well as my advancing age of 51.

Death is universal, but customs and traditions surrounding it can be quite different, depending on where you live. Up here in Maine, if you die in the winter, you may have a funeral but you won't be buried until the spring, because that is when the ground thaws. Talk about closure - can you imagine having to deal with someone's death in early winter and not being able to have the graveside service until months later? That might be why cremations are a popular choice here.

But, oh, a rural southern funeral is a class unto itself. Some funerals I attended in the South were moving and poignant. At other times, I felt it could have been done with a little more dignity. I remember grocery shopping in a Tennessee Kroger's once, and as I passed by the floral department I noticed some funeral wreaths on display. One in particular caught my eye. It was a large spray on an easel, and applied to the wreath was a toy plastic telephone with its attached receiver perched above it and the cord winding its way down to the base. And on the red satin ribbon I read: "JESUS CALLED." I kid you not.

The quote with which I began this post, though, made me think. The deceased's family had bought this space on the obituary page to honor their matriarch who died a couple of years ago. They knew that their mother had been a great influence during her life, and they threw the question out there like one of those pebbles skipping across the lake.

"How long after you are gone will we realize the ripples you left in the pool of life?"

I can think of two major questions that haunt most people when they consider their own deaths. (1) What happens now? (2) What effect has my life had on the world?

Ed has always had this comment on his years of ministry: "The people I have come in contact with either love me or hate me. But they will never forget me." He says that whether his presence and teaching generated renewal or anger in his churches, it didn't matter. Those people will be forever changed because their paths crossed with his. He says that with each encounter we have, those involved in the encounter will never be the same because of the encounter. We have shared a part of ourselves.

It would be nice to say that we had great power and influence in the world during our lifetimes. Nonetheless, I have an inkling we have had more power and influence than we realize. Little by little, we sink to the bottom, but our ripples go on and on.

There's nothing like an obituary page to give you something to wrap your brain around.

The Land of Anhedonia

Despite never having been out of the USA except for Canada, I still consider myself a seasoned traveller inside this country. I have spent the last two days watching home movies covering trips to Colorado, Washington, DC, New York City, Florida, Illinois, and everything in between.

There's one area I try to keep out of, though. It's not fun and not exciting. The entrance is free, but you end up paying a big price. I'm talking about the Land of Anhedonia, and it's where I've been for the last three days.

The word anhedonia stems originally from the Greek, and means literally "without pleasure." I have come across many patients in my medical transcription career who lived in this land for some time. Medically, it usually refers to a clinical scenario where the patient finds no pleasure in life, especially in doing things that ordinarily would bring her great pleasure. It is a kind of dark apathy, where "I don't care" is thought more often than not (along with "Why bother?") and where depression is probably involved in a moderate or heavy manner.

I think it becomes easy to slide into the Land of Anhedonia when several life events collide until something has to give. Be they financial, obligational, familial, situational (such as trying to sell a house, maybe?), the brain just cannot continue to function on a normal level and just tries to shut itself down.

Mozart was once accused of using "too many notes" for the brain to appreciate. Anhedonia is kind of like the response of the brain to "too many notes." It considers its only alternative to be a nearly total shutdown. It's just a coping mechanism.

This past Sunday, I was at work when I felt illness coming on, vis-a-vis a sore throat and malaise, and by Monday morning I approached my supervisor with a request to take the rest of the week off. I initially thought I was becoming physically ill, but I soon realized I was taking a visit to the Land of Anhedonia, and I just prayed it would be a short one.

I stayed in bed for hours at a time, went 24 hours without eating anything, and vacillated between anxiety and apathy. Ed finally made me get out of bed and get dressed. I spent the rest of the time watching the aforementioned home movies. My silly son's impressions got me to laughing again, and soon I could feel I was packing up to leave Anhedonia and get back into life.

I was grateful to friends and family, who tried to convince me that I had stayed away long enough and it was safe to come "home." The best antidote to the Land of Anhedonia, though, is grandchildren. Yep, I firmly believe it. You can't hold them in your arms and not have love envelop you and warm your entire soul.

I was rocking Charlotte today, and instead of anxiety, I had a peaceful calm come over me, and I started softly singing one of my favorite hymns:

For the beauty of the earth
For the glory of the skies,
For the love which from our birth
Over and around us lies.

Refrain

Lord of all, to Thee we raise,
This our hymn of grateful praise.

For the beauty of each hour,
Of the day and of the night,
Hill and vale, and tree and flower,
Sun and moon, and stars of light.

Refrain

For the joy of ear and eye,
For the heart and mind’s delight,
For the mystic harmony
Linking sense to sound and sight.

Refrain

For the joy of human love,
Brother, sister, parent, child,
Friends on earth and friends above,
For all gentle thoughts and mild.

Refrain

For Thy Church, that evermore
Lifteth holy hands above,
Offering up on every shore
Her pure sacrifice of love.

It's good to be back.

The Process Continues

One of the minor annoyances of aging appears when I finally get to sleep in and wake up early anyway. That explains why I am blogging at 4:45 a.m. this morning. My body says "s-l-e-e-p" but my mind says "WAKE UP!"

I stumbled across an episode of Nova on PBS last night. It was The Miracle of Life, a documentary on human conception, pregnancy, and birth. From the very first time I was pregnant, I happily researched this kind of information. I contemplated everything that was going on inside my body at every minute. I clearly remember one day when I was working at the hospital in Memphis. At the time, I was pregnant with Rachel, and I recall stepping into an elevator and meeting a friend, who asked how I was doing. I replied, "My baby has fingernails now!" Every detail was fascinating to me.

And it still fascinates me. How could it not? Back in 1977-78, I only had library books to devour. Now we have DVDs with movies and photographs which are colorful and vivid and detailed of what is happening to a developing baby.

As actor John Lithgow's narration described the baby's dividing cells, the forming of nerve pathways, the DNA assignments, I was glued to the TV screen. Then he said something that really stuck with me. He described the literal building blocks and design of the developing baby, and mentioned that it was a process that would still continue through the baby's uterine existence and for years to come.

It is so tempting to think of in utero as the development, then the birth as the final event. But instead, in utero is stage 1, and birth is just the beginning. Our cells continue to die and recreate, our brain continues to develop neural pathways and lose others. Heck - every pound of fat we gain requires that our body build another mile of blood vessels! The whole life system is a process, continually regrouping and recreating.

And so is the process of simplifying, downsizing, and recreating our lives. That is one of the fascinating things about life, but it is also the most draining, in my opinion. My busy dad used to say, "...when things lighten up." But I don't think they ever did. It was always something because he was in the process of living. As are we all.

I keep thinking that after selling this house, building the next house, then moving and settling down, things will "lighten up," but deep down I know better. Life will still have its challenges and joys, we will still be struggling to simplify as we recreate our roles in life. The "process" started with me 9 months before September 27, 1954, and I hope it continues for many years to come. As the expression says, "That's life." And what a remarkable journey it is!

The Art of Not Waiting

In my medical transcription profession, I have been introduced (through dictation) to many patients who have had gastric bypass surgery. It's amazing how they can go through that and lose over 100 pounds in a short time. I once read a book that discussed in detail what these people have to go through for the rest of their lives, eating small portions, taking vitamins, suffering some side effects, etc. The book's author wondered if it wouldn't be better if, instead of going through the surgery, the patients just started living as if they had (eating small portions). He said that since they would have to live on small portions the rest of their lives anyway, why not just "bypass" the surgery altogether? Could it be accomplished without the pain? Of course, it's much more complicated than that, but I did think about that this week.

It's been a week of deaths. Teenager deaths. Young adult deaths. Nobody that I know personally, but when you hear about deaths like these, you can't help but suffer emphathetically with the families, no matter what the circumstances.

At an MT web site, Julie posted about a car accident this week in her community that killed several high school seniors. Right after that, I discovered that a young man from Matt's graduating class was killed locally, just a few blocks from my house, when a drunk woman rammed her car into the back of his. The collision was so hard, he ended up in his own back seat.

It was a weird feeling to think that in the wee hours of Saturday morning, while I was asleep, this young man was in the wreck and died at the hospital where I work. Of course, I could be extra-sensitive to this kind of thing, because my brain reacts in unusual ways. For instance, whenever I pass a wedding party coming out of a church, my mind wonders how many people are attending or preparing for funerals somewhere else. And when I pass a funeral procession, I wonder how many people are decorating the church for their wedding or picking out bridesmaid dresses. In fact, when that horrible 9/11 was being broadcast on every channel, I was thinking, "This day will live in infamy, to quote FDR. Yet there are people who are giving birth today, others having 50th wedding anniversaries." I always see the dichotomy - the celebration amidst the grieving, and the weeping amidst the laughter.

The families of those dead young people this week were going along with their daily lives the way we all do - probably without a lot of thought, some vague plans, some hopes and dreams, some irritants, some arguments, and a lot of procrastination. Then their world was turned upside down and changed in an instant. All of a sudden, priorities are revised. Little things that used to bother them are dropped from the radar. The families unite, the community unites, and people begin talking about what's important in life. And the thought goes round, from family, friends, acquaintances, teachers, preachers, neighbors, all who are affected by the deaths - "This has made me wake up and realize..." Each person completes the sentence in a different way, but the acknowledgment is the same from each heart. "...that relationships are what's important in life...." "....that it's time to rearrange my priorities..." "....that we must hug our kids at every opportunity..." "...that the disagreement I had with my spouse/child/parent/friend is so unimportant in the scheme of things..." "....that we need to love fully and completely while we have the chance..."

So that's why I thought about the author's comment on gastric bypass surgery this week. I wish it didn't take tragedies like this to force us to prioritize our lives. I wish we could just do it in the first place.

Nesting

While I was home for lunch yesterday, I ate my food with a great view of the side yard. Since Venise took the blinds and screens off the kitchen windows, we have a clear unobstructed view of nature (which, as I have posted before, I prefer to enjoy from behind a window anyway). I caught a movement out of the corner of my eye and finally saw a brown squirrel among the leaves on the ground. I saw her put something in her mouth, then scurry up the nearest tree and jump her way across branches to another tree, wherein she disappeared for a few seconds. Then there she was again, backtracking her same route down to the ground. Ever the nature-ignorant person, I asked Ed to look and tell me what she had in her mouth. He laughed and said she was gathering piles of leaves and taking them up the tree to build a nest.

After I was clear on what I was looking at, the little squirrel began to fascinate me. She could gather an enormous quantity of leaves in her mouth and in her many trips back and forth, I saw only one leaf slip away and float back to the ground.

The irony did not escape me. In my blog, I give a description of Ed and me as "empty nesters," with the kids grown and married and starting families of their own, and "just us" here. That fact again presented itself when we signed a disclosure paper, which in part, gave reasons why we were selling the house. Venise wrote something like, "Their children have grown up and moved out and the house is much, much too big for just the two of them."

"The two of them." Yep, that's us. In my original family, it was the 4 of us - Mom, Dad, sister Joy, and me. Then I got married and again it was the 4 of us - Ed and me, Rachel and Matthew. And now it is the 2 of us. Although we have extended and enlarged the family with additions of Chris and Sarah and Caroline and Charlotte, as well as Joy's family, it still comes down to the 2 of us.

The little squirrel is just starting out for the season, carefully preparing her nest for the little ones to come. And we are at the other end of the spectrum, cleaning out, getting rid of, and other duties befitting our new status of "empty nesters." It reminds me so much of one of the most poignant parts of the Bible:

There is a time for everything,
and a season for every activity under heaven:

a time to be born and a time to die,
a time to plant and a time to uproot,

a time to kill and a time to heal,
a time to tear down and a time to build...

And the cycle of life continues. And I am so grateful to be a part of it - whatever stage I'm in.

Plate Puzzles

Ed says the older he gets, the more cynical he gets. As for me, I'm getting more easily frustrated by simple, quite stupid things.

One thing that seems to tick me off is trying to decipher confusing vanity license plates. Now I have a personalized plate, myself. I thought long and hard about the meaning of my choice, which ended up being C-HARP. It stands for Celtic harp as opposed to a pedal harp. I realize, of course, that very few people will be able to interpret the "C" for "Celtic." That's OK, and I accept that. The HARP, part, though, is plainly understood. Apparently I play the harp. Some people at first glance thought it said, "C-SHARP," which, of course, is just misreading.

Since I also play piano and organ, as well as transcribe, I initially considered using something akin to KEYBOARD, but that's one too many letters. It would have to be KEBOARD, or KEYBORD, both which would undoubtedly have been understood, but my refusal to have an actual misspelled word on my license plate ruled those one out. Too bad; I thought it was a clever idea.

I also considered something to do with quilts, but a quick check of the State of Maine database showed me the good ones were taken. I'm wasn't going the KWILT route, either.

Ed's license plate is HEALING. People assume he's a doctor, but that's what you get when you make assumptions. He has preached on how the root of "salvation" is "salve," which brings up the healing component. So he uses it spiritually, not physically. At least it's a valid word and spelled correctly.

This morning on our trip to Bangor, I noticed a personalized plate and I could not make out for the life of me what it meant. I can't even remember it exactly so I can include it here, but believe me, I spent a good 10 minutes twisting those letters around to make some kind of sense. Nothing - I got absolutely nothing. That drove me crazy. Here it is 4:30 p.m. and I'm still fuming about it.

It seems to me, if you are going to create a personalized license plate to tell the world something about who you are, or what you do, or what your nickname is, or where you live, or what team you support - it ought to be easily understood. I suppose the owner of the aforementioned plate knew what those letters meant, but I don't think anybody else had a clue.

Ed's theory (cynical as always) is that some people actually pay extra for a vanity plate just so they can put something totally nonsensical on there to drive people like me insane as we try to figure it out.

Please think about this the next time you choose a personalized plate. If I see it and can't make heads or tails of it, you might just ruin an otherwise perfectly good day.

Cleanliness is next to....

...confusion. Our first house showing is tomorrow and we have been cleaning and putting things up all afternoon and evening. Ah, memories - of last year around this time.

It's great to have a clean and shiny house. It's not so great when we want to find something. I can guarantee you it's not where I last put it. It's tucked away somewhere, out of sight, in order to make the house clean and uncluttered. Oh, it's cluttered all right. Just hidden clutter.

The dog bed is rolled up and stuffed in the back of a cedar chest under some hanging clothes in the closet. The shampoo is stuck in a box in another closet. Countless things have been stuck in drawers; they are so accessible for shoving something in. The wall calendar is...let's see, where did I put that?

I think selling houses is for people younger than we are. People still with all their brains, not just part of them. It's hard enough to remember where you put the keys; it's much worse when you've packed keys into boxes. (Yes, our spare house key, which we need to give to the real estate agent, is packed in a box somewhere, so we had to have another one made.)

We are cleaning like the white tornado. You Baby Boomers will remember the white tornado; you younger ones will say, "Huh?" Here's a quote from a computer web site:

AJAX officially stands for Asynchronous Javascript And XML. Of course for me, a baby boomer who grew up watching TV commercials back in the Sixties, AJAX will always be a "white tornado" for cleaning my kitchen floor, or a "white knight on a horse" who would point his lance at people in the park and their clothes would turn magically clean because AJAX was "stronger than dirt."

So tonight we have a shiny clean house ready for showing. We can't find anything, but it certainly looks good. Just don't open any drawers.

Mind Games

When I was in high school and practically lived at the library, I discovered Agatha Christie and her eccentric Belgian detective, Hercule Poirot. He claimed that his unique ability to solve crimes was due to the health of "ze leetle gray cells" - his brain.

Now that the Baby Boomer generation is close to retirement age, magazines are full of articles on how to prevent the dreaded Alzheimer's disease. Part of their advice is to use your brain over and over, in varying ways, to keep the little gray cells active. Things like doing crossword puzzles are OK, I suppose. I get on a tangent sometimes and will do the daily crossword puzzle in the paper for two weeks in a row, then I'll drop it for something else and won't do another for a year. My Aunt June adores crossword puzzles, and she's still mentally going blockbusters.

However, I prefer to personalize my brain activities. What better way than to play around with my memories? It seems that when we Baby Boomers are well into the second half of our lives, we look more to the past and less to the future.

One activity I do with my brain is to try to remember the floor plans of buildings that have meant something to me. Take my home church, Harris Memorial United Methodist Church in Memphis. It burned down a long time ago, but that building (along with the aforementioned library) was our second home for a lot of every week. I go through the annals of my mind and picture each room, each door, each hall, each set of stairs, then try to draw it all out on a piece of paper. Of course, memories are not infallible, and I would really enjoy taking several former Harris Memorial members and having them do this same thing, then comparing the drawings. That would be enlightening! I try to do the same kind of thing with my high school, or the places I have worked. I believe it stimulates the brain very well.

Ever the "method-ist," my second game is a memory game organized under the labels "earth, wind, water, and fire" - the elements. I methodically go through each category and list the memories I associate with it. For example: For earth, I try to remember anything having to do with the ground or dirt, such as sliding on the front lawn on cardboard boxes. For wind, I remember when Joy and I used to play badminton on the front lawn and the wonderful feel of a good hit when the birdie seemed to float through the air forever. Water is pretty easy - I'm sure most of us can think of a lot of memories involving water. One of mine involves the Mississippi River, when Dad would take whoever was willing up to the park on the bluff, to see what he considered the best view of the Mississippi River, bar none. I have Dad in the fire category, too, for all the "wild goose chases" he used to drag us through when he saw a fire engine roaring past.

My third game is to remember things with the senses. I list the smells, tastes, noises, sights, and textures of my life. The smell of fresh-cut grass when our family worked together out in the yard in the summer (and as contrast, the smell of Mrs. Perry's old house with many, many cats). The taste of pot pies, our supper on nights Dad was at a meeting (and as contrast, the taste of milk of magnesia). The sound of our cat Mike jumping on the piano keys when I was trying to practice. The blinding light in my eyes when Dad was filming his home movies. The texture of the sharp jacks and the smooth round ball in my hand at the same time.

So many pleasant memories are from my growing up years, but I have others as an adult. The smell of the ocean up here in Maine. The taste of different brands of chocolate. The first time I heard the beautiful sounds of the Celtic harp. Seeing the kids graduate from high school. "Fondling" the fabric at the quilt store.

It's hard sometime just to ask, "What are the memories of your life?" It's much easier to sort through them using "ze leetle gray cells" and a little methodology. Who knows - it may not ward off dementia - but it certainly is a lot of fun!

Becoming Unhinged

When we first bought this house, we were enchanted by the leaded glass arts and crafts cabinet doors in part of the kitchen. It gave the area such charm. After a few years of dealing with them, though, Ed decided he would rather have open shelves, so he took the doors off and stored them in the garage.

One problem was in their construction. The glass was precariously propped inside the door frame. It was heavy, and kept in place with a couple of tiny nails. Every time Ed would open the door, he was afraid the glass would fall out.

The second problem was in their hinge setup. All the cabinet doors in the kitchen used special break-away hinges. If we opened the door to a certain point, the door would virtually come off the cabinet, and part of the hinge (spring-loaded) on the door side snapped back into place, and we had to get our extra-tiny screwdriver to dig the stubborn piece out of the hinge so we could rehang the door. It was a major pain, to say the least. If you can imagine how often one opens cabinet doors in the kitchen, you would be quite accurate as to how many times Ed lost his cool. It was especially hard when I was the door opener, because if I opened an upper cabinet and the top hinge gave way, I had to stand there holding the door while I yelled for help.

So you can see why, as beautiful as they are, the cabinet doors were exiled to the garage.

One of the first things Venise said when we showed her the leaded glass doors was, "These things have GOT to come back up!" We kind of expected her to say that. Since she promised to help us reinstall them, we relented. I told Ed that using those doors would be one of the many "inconveniences" we would have to undergo while the house was on the market. Venise suggested that we clean out the cabinets and then we would not even have to open the doors, and that made sense.

So before our workday on Friday, Ed and I went to the hardware store to buy more hinges, as he had thrown away all the original hinges from the cabinet side. Well, we right off the bat we learned that they don't make those hinges anymore. I guess they just didn't cut it in the market (wonder why?!). So we showed the hardware man the door we had taken with us, and together we searched for hinges of the same general type that would work. We spent close to $100, but we knew it was a good investment in getting the kitchen to look its best.

When Venise tried to hang the doors, nothing fit. The doors overlapped when she tried to close them. She voiced our options: Maybe have a carpenter come by who could either cut off part of the doors (we nixed that one) or could dig out some of the cabinet itself where the hinges were. The problem was that the hinges had a lip that was supposed to hug the cabinet. It hugged the cabinet all right, but that limited the position of the hinges to the width of the lip. Therefore, we couldn't move the doors outward so they would meet solidly in the middle.

So yesterday, Ed hung the rest of the doors on that wall, and as you can see, the doors overlap in the middle and are not straight at all. He said, "Well, if we have a carpenter come by, at least the doors will be up so he can see our predicament and figure out exactly what needs to be done."

Oh Joy, where are you with your knowledge and tools???? What a delicious challenge this would be for you!

Last night, after much thought, we discussed another option. The reason why regular old hinges never worked on those doors was the fact that with regular hinges, the doors would not close all the way. Well, they'd close, but then swing back a little. This resulted in about a 1-inch gap. However, on one of our cabinets, we have little thingies (that may not be the technical term....) installed on the bottom which click and hold the door shut. Ed wondered if we could take all the doors back down and install regular hinges with the "thingies" to ensure the door would stay shut. The old-fashioned, regular hinges would allow us to move the doors over and everything would be fine.

So back to the hardware store we go to see if our plan works. I'll let you know. In the meantime, I am packing up the expensive hinges and sending them to my sister, Joy. I'm sure she can use them in one of her many creative woodworking projects. As for me, it has been quite an experience.

Oh yes - Ed also got tiny plastic thingies (no relation to the cabinet thingies) to screw in place to hold the glass securely in the door frame. When I said, "If it was that easy to be able to hold the glass in, why didn't you do that years ago?" All I got was "the look." You know which look I mean. I imagine I'll be seeing that look more and more as we continue our house-selling venture!

Dream House

On my favorite medical transcription site, there is a discussion around this question: "If money were no object, what would you change about your house?" In other words, what would describe your dream house?

The interesting part of this discussion is that everyone's idea of her dream house is partly dependent on what stage of life she finds herself in. After I posted some pictures of our Victorian house, some posters unequivocably stated this house would be their dream house. Yet, our dream house is not anything like this one, at this time. There are a myriad of dream houses out there. (And, for some Katrinia victims, any viable house would be a dream house for them.)

There are a lot of magazine articles out there about Baby Boomers and their life challenges and opportunities. In my reading, I notice that there are some Boomers who are experiencing the empty nest and are downsizing, as we are. There are others who never want to get out of the race for accumulation. These people think that having less is not more and that the journey of upward mobility never ends. To them, it is a sign of failure if their next car is smaller or less expensive than their present one, or if their next house is not as ostentatious or in as wealthy a neighborhood as the one where they live now. This, of course, may be due in part to our society's insistence on labeling the worth of individuals based on their financial wealth and quantity/quality of possessions - after all, you could be extremely rich, but how would people know that unless your house, car, and clothes reveal your status to the world?

It's all in timing, I have discovered. This beautiful Victorian was our dream house when we bought it. We had 2 teenagers (and one live-in guest), and after all the tiny parsonages we had lived in, we were ectastic to be here.

But as we journeyed on, our situation changed. As our family has gotten smaller, it seems the house has gotten bigger. (Ed, who has lost 30 pounds in the last few years, definitely feels that he has gotten smaller and the house has gotten bigger!) Our needs change, and we adjust.

In the same way that financial experts advise you to take time every few years to reevaluate your investments, your insurance needs, and your financial changes, I think it is worthwhile to stop and evaluate your lifestyle options. Think about your priorities. Think about the hidden costs (not always financial) of your chosen lifestyle. Choose your path with integrity and thoughtfulness, not letting "the world" decide who you are. It may be that you need a smaller house, it may be that you need to use less of the world's resources, it may be that you need to spend more time with your family and less time at the office, it may be that you don't need that new item of clothing as much as you thought you did.

However, if, like our family in 1996 when we moved to Maine, you have several children who need plenty of room to hang out, or you need space for family and friends to visit - well, in that case, this is your dream house. Call our agent, Venise, ASAP!

The Urgency of the Matter

We had our new real estate agent Venise over today for an all-day work session. And boy, did she work! She brought her assistant with her and between the two of them and what Ed and I could contribute, the house got a makeover in several places today. No job was too dirty or difficult for Venise to tackle. She and her assistant took down screens, washed windows, hung doors, vacuumed, dusted, mopped, scrubbed tile - it was totally amazing and gratifying to find someone who wants to sell the house as much as we do!

When we lived in Tennessee, one of our favorite things to do was watch the cable channel A&E, and one of our most enjoyable shows was America's Castles. From that show, we learned how the mansions of America were built for names like the Vanderbilts, Rockefellers, and other lesser known but just as filthy rich families. A thread of poignancy frequently ran through the mansions' histories, however. So many times the rich old man would spend years having the best architects and craftsmen and goldmiths and engineers build his dream house, then he would move in and about a year or two later, he would die.

We joke about our own dream house, which exists so far only in our minds and in the detailed drawings of the Coastline Homes company, but Ed has mentioned a few times that his desire to start building it ASAP is due to watching America's Castles. He is so afraid that he will finally the get his dream house and then not live to enjoy it.

It is a dream house for us, even while we are living in a house which might serve as a dream house to others. Our future house will not be big, will not be grandiose or splendid in form or decoration. It will not have the most expensive flooring, won't have a hot tub or the latest "must-have" in the major appliance department. But it will be our castle, and we want to have many years ahead of us to appreciate it.

So time's awastin' - and after being stuck with Ed all day, listening to his endless stories, taking his teasing, "laughing" at his jokes, Venise now knows the importance of selling the house quickly, so Ed can live many years in his dream house - that is, if she doesn't kill him first!

Ode to Ed

We are on the last two weeks before the curtain rises on our house, so to speak, and I want to document here that Ed has worked like a crazy man. (Since he has always been a crazy man, he was halfway there to begin with.) Venise left us with a long laundry list of chores, and Ed has responded with alacrity. He has already packed up most of the extra kitchen dishes/pots/etc. He has cleared out the curio cabinet and moved it in preparation for taking it upstairs. He has moved the big leather chair out of the TV room and into the front parlor/dining room. He emptied out the shelves in the pantry. I had already boxed up my Christmas village houses and figurines, but he put all those small boxes into one giant box for me. Then he took all the boxes he had packed upstairs. In the midst of all this, he has been doing his usual cooking, washing dishes, walking the dog, and even did some of my laundry.

He mentioned to me that he wanted to "bowl Venise over with what two old people can do."
Bowl indeed - he is getting strikes at every turn! Go, Ed!

The Life of an Old House

Miss Meg from Georgia responded to my last post with this:

Do you feel pangs of rejection because others don't immediatly fall in love with your house? We have been here 28 years. Our daughter was 5 when we moved in and she now has a 6 yo, 5yo and one on the way. So much time passed, so many memories... and nobody seems to see the beauty of all those yesterdays as we do.

Oh, my, yes! The same feelings we had at our yard sale last year ("Why don't you want to buy our stuff? Are you questioning our taste, our judgment in buying these things?") were magnified many times when we tried to sell the house.

The above picture was taken last week.

A brief history of the house: Our house is a Queen Anne Victorian built in the late 1800s. It has 2 balconies and a wrap-around gazebo porch, parquet floors (beautiful, in need of some refinishing), sitting on a corner lot in a city of 5000 people. We have a picture of the house taken in 1903, which shows an addition of a carriage house on the other side of the picture above, extending at a right angle to the house.

We had lived our lives in Tennessee and fell in love with Maine on a vacation and for some odd reason just decided to move here. So the next vacation we spent here, we wanted to look at houses. We wanted an old, rambling, house with big rooms for the teenagers to enjoy, room to have their friends over, room for my sewing and quilting things, and a nice big kitchen where Ed could cook. We were living in a parsonage at the time, so we didn't have to worry about selling an existing house, and after years of living in rural Tennessee areas, we had promised Matt (who would be 13 when we moved) a neighborhood. We made our way to a real estate office in and asked to look at houses. We told them we had 4 days before we had to leave for Tennessee, and asked them to cram as many showings as possible in that amount of time.

Alas, the houses they showed us were not quite what we were looking for. The room sizes were not as big as we had hoped. After all, today kids have computers and TVs and stereos, and need more space than in the past. We had a four-poster bed with dresser and bureau and night stand which would not have fit in any of the rooms we saw.

Finally on the third day, we were sitting at the real estate office, once again trying to impart our vision to them when our daughter Rachel found a house picture on the bulletin board.
"Hey, Mom and Dad," she said. "Isn't this like what you are looking for?" We immediately fell in love with the picture and asked to see the house.

The next day, when Matt and I walked first into the front door, I remember distinctly looking at him and mouthing the words, "I want this house!" It just spoke to us. The charm, the history, the well-worn interior. How many children's footsteps had raced down that staircase?

We knew, however, that if we bought the house, we would want to build an addition. The upstairs area was fine for the teenagers, but there was not enough room for us. So we left town after making an offer, and went back to Tenneessee, not even knowing if the house would be ours.

The couple selling the house had recently been divorced, he had moved out, and she had stayed here with her 2 children. She really needed time to find another place. And, as luck would have it, we didn't need to move until a year and a half, when Rachel would graduate from high school. It was a win-win situation. We let her live here rent-free while she looked for another house and gave her kids adjustment time - and she was here in the house so our insurance company was satisfied that the house was been looked after and maintained.

During the time we waited to move, we had an addition built in the back, the bottom floor for a 2-car garage, the floor above that for the master bedroom suite, and the room above that for an exercise/laundry room. Now we had our private space, on the other end of the world from the kids upstairs and their music and friends. Yet, we still had the charm of the older home.
(Rachel used to say, "Yeah, the charm. How come we have to live in the 'charming old part' of the house and you get to live in the new part?")

We have lived here 10 years now, building a lot of memories in the process. The house has been good to us. We have always been well aware that we are but a few years' history for the house. We have improved parts of it and know that those coming after us will improve even more. We have left our mark, and when we leave, we will cry.

I just knew that every single person walking in here like I did would fall in love with the house. I was quite surprised and disappointed when that didn't happen, for whatever reasons. I know there has got to be another family out there who want to walk the old wood floors, touch the unique old masonry fireplace that has stood for well over a century. As they say, "If these walls could talk...."

Yes, Miss Meg, you have hit the nail on the head. I don't feel that we are abandoning the house as much as I feel we are giving another family the exciting opportunity to build their own memories in this house. And so far, they aren't willing.

Two more weeks and we will try again!

Exit Strategy

Yesterday we had our appointment with Venise, our new realtor. She is a self-confessed workaholic who loves challenges and is eager to start marketing the house. Just the person we need! She took us through the house, making a work list for us.

We had just opened the door to Matt's old room, where we are storing extra furniture, when she took a look and and turned to us in astonishment. "You're moving into a house half this size," she exclaimed, "and you still have this much furniture?!" Uh oh. Another wake-up call. Time to pare down again.

The problem seems to be that 1) we can't really visualize the size of our new house, despite the detailed computerized layout, so we don't know what items of our present furniture will work the best, and 2) we keep thinking about Matt and Sarah.

Matt and Sarah have been married for less than a year and live in a tiny apartment. One day, of course, they will have a house and they might be able to use some of this extra furniture. Where to store it until then, however, is the question. This is the "I may need it some day" syndrome that plagues downsizers. (Slightly modified to the "They may need it some day" syndrome.)

Venise is absolutely right, though. We did a lot of paring down this time last year before we first put the house up for sale. It's now time for the second paring, and believe me, it doesn't get any easier. Paring down means making decisions, an skill in which I have always been lacking, due to an inherent tendency to second-guess myself.

And from the fact that Ed spent a good 15 minutes in a diatribe about the validity of keeping several years' worth of quilting magazines stored in perpetuity, I can foresee that the next six months will be - shall we say - entertaining?

Deja Vu

Thanks to my exceptional high school French teachers, my life has been enriched because of my basic knowledge of French. This knowledge especially comes in handy in my capacity as a medical transcriptionist. The average person might be surprised at how many French words and phrases pop up in medical transcription. Peau d'orange is one. Petit mal is another. And deja vu is another. (There are supposed to be accents in there, but with this blog formatting, I apparently don't have the option, at least I can't find the instructions.)

There is a funny story in our family about deja vu. We were all eating at a Cracker Barrel restaurant a few years ago and Rachel blurted out, "Oh my, I just had deja vu!" To which my mother replied, "The bathroom is that way."

I'm getting that feeling of deja vu, because tomorrow our new real estate agent is coming to the house so we can sign the contract papers. Wasn't it this time last year that we went through this? I can look back and remember our feelings - we had so much confidence and hope. After all, the house is so beautiful, we thought it would sell itself. Then came the problems, leading to discouragement, leading to despair, and we took the house off the market with the sole intention of just surviving the winter and trying again in the spring.

So here we are, almost March. I wouldn't quite call it spring here in Maine with several inches of snow on the ground, but it will come eventually. And it's deja vu.

Of course, there's another French phrase I run across in medical transcription - it's jamais vu. The opposite of deja vu, jamais vu means "never seen." Last year we never saw a person or family who went to the bank for a down payment. Last year we never saw someone in love with the house who could also afford it. Most importantly, last year we never saw Coastline Homes break ground for our new house.

Yes, I've had quite enough of deja vu for awhile. Bring on the jamais vu - and bonne chance to us!

Time Warp?

Does time really warp memory? Now that I'm 51 and counting, I wonder how many of my childhood memories are real and how many are embellished by time.

Memphis, my hometown, had snow yesterday. My sister and her family were so excited, as snow is a rare occurrence in Memphis. Then why do I remember many snows from my childhood? We have home movies of my sister and me having snowball fights and building snow forts. Did Memphis really have more frequent snows when we were growing up, or did Dad take the home movies of them because they were so rare?

My general feeling of snow in my childhood is that it was not frequent, but it was not rare, either. I didn't look on it as a once-in-a-lifetime occurrence; I expected it every once in awhile. My son-in-law, Chris, denigrates the idea that Memphis ever gets snow. I had to pull out pictures to prove it. Yes, we had snow. Plows - no. Snow - yes.

So I decided to do some Internet research. I can research a medical term with quick success, but trying to track down the snow history of Memphis was quite difficult. Everyone assumes when you ask for weather information that you want the forecast. Even typing in "history" gives me things like "This Day in Weather History," not at all the information I desire.

I did come up with the history of snow in Memphis on Christmas Day, however, from a study at Oak Ridge Laboratories in Tennessee. Here is what they said:

Records that go back to 1889 show that Memphis had a measurable amount of snow on Christmas only once in 107 years. That was in 1913 when 3.5 inches of snow fell on Christmas Day (1.4 inches was on the ground at 7:00 a.m. that day). Trace amounts (only a few flakes - not enough to measure), fell on seven occasions - 1914, 1918, 1926, 1948, 1975, 1980, and 1992.

There has been a few times when there was snow on the ground Christmas morning (from previous storms). The greatest was 1963 when 10 inches covered the city Christmas morning; 1962 had 2 inches on the ground, and there were patches of snow scattered around on Christmas morning in 1966.

Now this research only covers Christmas Day, not whole winters, which, of course, would have had more snow than this. However, the dates are significant. The 1960s. I consider this the decade of my childhood, basically when I was old enough to create memories, but before I was inducted into the semi-adult world of high school. So, yes, those home movies were not some technological manipulation of my Dad and his film splicer. Those were real snows and I was really enjoying them. My memory is vindicated.

And the walk home from school was long, too. So there.

As for my husband Ed, I'm not sure about his memory. When we shared our first Christmas together, we pulled out the stockings of our childhoods. The size of my stocking was generous, with a wide opening and wide foot, enough room to stuff whatever Santa had in mind. Ed's stocking was limp, skinny, with a hole at the top in which I could barely stick my small fist.

At the very beginning, Ed let me know what "Santa" should put in his stocking. Fruit and nuts. Besides the fact that such a Christmas offering would make me gag unless there was plentiful candy and other goodies accompanying it, I couldn't understand how Santa had given little Eddie his fruit and nut delicacies when he had to get them through that tiny opening in his stocking. I did not see how it was physically possible.

Then I learned more - Santa had not only brought him oranges and apples, but the oranges had always been navel oranges and they were GIANT. Huge, oversized, heavy, juicy navel oranges. Now, it was hard for me to stick a regular little orange in his pitiful stocking - but no way had a huge navel orange ever resided there. Couldn't happen, didn't happen. Physics or whatever science supervises that area of space and size would not have allowed it. I maybe could squeeze a couple of small apples and one small orange into it and that would be it. His stocking would then take on the appearance of an engorged snake who had just eaten several frogs which one could see as bulging lumps in his body.

To this day, Ed swears he got those giant navel oranges in his stocking every Christmas when he was growing up. He can't explain how he himself can't fit even one big orange in there today.

Next time you hear about the "magic of Christmas," don't scoff. If there can be snow in Memphis and giant oranges in Ed's skinny little stocking - anything can happen!

The Knowing

As I've mentioned before, I love the Serenity Prayer - to change the things you can, let go of the things you can't change, and the wisdom to know the difference.

That last part is frustrating. The knowing. As you know, I've had an undependable cable Internet connection for a month now. It would go in and out with no pattern and no predictability. Well, of course, I assumed it must be something I had done. I unplugged everything and plugged it back in. I made sure connections were tight and secure. I unplugged the wireless router and tried different cords. I had my son-in-law walk me through Mac network configurations. I called Matt constantly, begging for help.

Oh, I had already made an appointment with the cable provider, Adelphia, but that was a week away and I wanted it fixed NOW.

I couldn't even estimate how much time I spent trying to figure out things to experiment with. I unplugged the whole system and tried to move it to the exercise room and plug it in up there. I tried everything. Still, the Internet would come and go. Once the connection came back on immediately when I did some re-plugging, and I thought, All right! I fixed it! Then, of course, in a few minutes it was out again, so it was just coincidence.

I even went to Radio Shack and bought another modem, thinking maybe that would do it. Alas, Adelphia somehow knew I was trying to hook up an "unauthorized" modem, according to the message I got on the screen. I returned the modem.

Adelphia finally came yesterday. I was disheartened to see that I had my Internet connection when he got here. I was so afraid he would say, "Well, everything appears to be working; I'm leaving." But he checked the system out and found out that the cable had come loose from the pole outside. He spent about an hour here and fixed everything. Yay - I have reliable Internet again!

The frustrating part of it all was that I did not know if I had the power to change the situation or not. In the end, there was nothing I could have done, other than climb up the pole myself.
I spent a lot of time for nothing, all because I didn't know.

Some things we just know we can't change. I can't change Ed's aggravatingly slow energy level, I can't be assured the house will sell this spring, I can't go back and rewind my life and live it better, I can't be taller. No use worrying and fretting over that stuff. Some things we know good and well we can change, but for obscure reasons we haven't attempted the change. Other things are cloudy - do we have the power to change something or not? Might as well try.

I think that's one of the hardest parts of the Serenity Prayer. Knowing whether or not the energy and time you invest in an action can really effect change or not. So much of life, it seems to me, is operating blindly. Some of our greatest heroes in the past have lived and died without realizing the difference they made, whether their efforts were worth it, whether their lives made any difference. Years later, we realize they did make a difference. Even without that assurance, they did what they felt they had to do, whether it was compose music or lead a movement.

I guess that's just life. We have no guarantees, and sometimes we just don't know exactly what we have the capability of changing unless we try. Sometimes we are disappointed, and sometimes we are flat out astonished at the results.

Connections

Ed and I have been reading What the Bleep Do We Know? - and it's taking us a long time to get through it because it is so deep - and intriguing, as it ties in quantum physics with theology and philosophy and biology - a fascinating read.

One of the chapters in the book discusses one incredible organ - the brain. Here are some random facts:

• The brain is at least 1,000 times faster than the fastest supercomputer in the world.
• The brain contains as many neurons as there are stars in the Milky Way - about 100 billion.
• Number of synapses in cerebral cortex = 60 trillion.
• A sand-grain-sized piece of a brain contains 100,000 neurons and a billion synapses.
• The brain is always "on" - it never turns off or even rests throughout our entire life.
• The brain continually rewires itself throughout life.

It was the last statement that gave me pause. Here is their explanation:

A fundamental rule of neuroscience is that nerve cells that fire together, wire together. If you do something once, a loose connection of neurons will form a network in response, but if you don't repeat the behavior, it will not "carve a track" in the brain. When something is practiced over and over again, those nerve cells develop a stronger and stronger connection, and it gets easier and easier to fire that network.

If you keep hitting the repeat button in the neuronets, those habits become increasingly hardwired in the brain and are difficult to change. As a connection is used over and over, it gets stronger, better established, like forging a path through tall grass by walking it again and again. This can be advantageous - it's called learning - but it also can make it difficult to change an unwanted behavior pattern.

Luckily, there's a flip side: Nerve cells that don't fire together, no longer wire together. They lose their long-term relationship.

I found that quite interesting. It does explain a lot, doesn't it? It explains how habits are hard to break, but it also gives hope that once a habit is repeatedly overwritten, it will eventually lose its power. This is called "rewiring the brain."

I've been thinking about connections recently because my Internet connection - my connection to the world, basically - has been in and out, in and out, no pattern, no consistency, and this results in a highly frustrating situation. I may have the connection for 5 minutes or 5 hours, never knowing when I start typing if I will be able to finish the post.

I really miss that connection to the world. And it's more than just paying bills online, shopping online, or checking today's headlines and comics. It's the connection with people, friends and family, that I miss.

I even miss being able to look up a piece of trivia. Ed and I will have myriad discussions on countless subjects, and there will come a place in the conversation (or argument!) where it comes time to prove whether I'm right or he's right - then Google here I come. At other times, we are both trying to remember a name or fact, and neither one of our old brains can come up with it, so we look it up. Those of you who are our age remember having sets of encyclopedias in our houses, which, of course, were out of date the moment they were printed. But it was the only way we had to look up anything back then. Now encyclopedias come on a single disk and they are updated constantly. And this is in addition to all the free information you can get from the Internet itself.

I heard on the news recently that, contrary to popular belief, the Internet has not made people less social. (A bleak picture had been painted of lonely, isolated people surfing the Internet instead of having relationships in real life.) Indeed, real life has emerged within the technology. It has in fact given people a wider group of friends from whom we receive advice, to whom we give advice, whom we encourage and support, with whom we cry and laugh and emphathize. The world-wide technological connection has not "depersonalized" us; it has widened our connection.

Well, I'm nearing the end of the post and I see the little lights on my modem are still bright green, and I haven't witnessed the dreaded "lights out" syndrome yet. Praise be! I do so like the connection!

Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered

I played piano for a few years at the local retirement home. My specialties were songs from the '20s through the '50s, as they are songs that I personally love and that the old folks appreciated too.

One of my favorite songs to play was "Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered." I thought of that song this morning as I awoke in the wee hours of the morning: "Couldn't sleep, and wouldn't sleep..." as the song goes. So I got up, showered, made a cup of hot tea, and sat down to watch PBS and quilt. The song, as is the case for most of us, kept going through my head. I decided that is a description of my life. Bewitched, bothered, and bewildered.

I am fascinated by the news. Yet, each news spot bothers and bewilders me more. So many angry people in the world! So much hate and intolerance! It's hard to fathom in my relatively quiet life. I'm bewitched - mesmerized - by all the stories and personalities. Every time I pick up a People magazine, I am bewildered again and again - because I don't recognize half the names of supposedly "famous" people. Ah, the difficulties of growing old and being "out of the loop."

Well, I can say I'm "in the loop" with my new cutting edge iMac. Now if Adelphia cable will just get by my house to fix my Internet connection....

I just don't know when to quit....

Matt and Sarah came by tonight to pick up the old computer and, of course, he had to sit down and check up on how my new iMac was going. It was a surprise to me, but apparently I had several applications open. I thought all I had to do was to click the red button in the corner and that was that. Apparently not. Matt patiently explained to me what the significance of open applications was and how to officially "quit" them, as he closed them one by one. All those programs were open yet not being used, taking memory and whatever else from my computer and not giving back anything in return.

Well, I guess I have the same problem in life. I don't know when to quit, don't know how to quit, and even worse, vacillate on whether I should quit. I'm not talking my job here, although I did harbor thoughts about that earlier this year. I'm talking about projects.

As I've said before, I'm the world's worst creator of UFOs (unfinished objects). I get great ideas and spurts of energy and go at something full force, but I soon put it away to start a new project. I don't "quit" - I just postpone. The project is still there, in my mind, and probably on a to-do list somewhere. UFOs like this can drain one's life force pretty quickly. I can name right now at least 4 projects that I have put away for "later" - and later never comes. Sometimes I just need to teach myself to give up, say, "OK, this is not apparently a priority in my life, nor is it very interesting at the moment. Maybe it's time to just let it go. Give it away. Use the materials for something else. Anything but let it sit in the corner or drawer, with my knowing full well I will never get around to completing it." There's a time for planning, a time for completion, and a time for outright burial. There's a sadness in quitting, but a release as well, I would imagine. I'll have to try it sometime. Works great on the iMac.