Old Dogs

 Our next-door neighbors have dogs. So do we. When I sit at my kitchen table to write, I look out on their fenced yard and see their dogs out playing and walking around. 

Petunia, the oldest and smallest, has developed Old Dog Vestibular Disease. That condition usually is severe in the beginning and then gets better after a couple of weeks. One of our dogs had it and I remember how scary it was at the time. Petunia is a 15-year-old terrier and the most persistent little dog I know. She wobbles and sometimes falls down, but never gives up. Every day she stumbles around the yard with great determination. She sometimes curls up in the sun and simply sniffs the air. Right now, she's inspirational to me.

I seem to have developed old people vestibular something or other. Through the last eight years of Qigong practice, my balance has improved immensely. That's just the opposite of what you might expect because I've simultaneously gotten older. Now, at 70, I have better balance, stronger legs and ankles, and surety of foot than I did a decade ago. And yet . . .

There are days the world spins. Yes, I know about the Epley Maneuver and use it. Often, it helps. Until the next time. When my head is heavy and unstable, when my steps are not entirely under my control, I remember how it felt in the bad old days I thought were the good old days, back when I drank to excess to produce that same effect. It was fun, wasn't it? Euphoria, out-of-control, funny. Walking into walls and tumbling down steps wasn't embarrassing, it was hilarious. Until the next day.

If I were a believer in punishing gods, I would think I'm getting my just desserts. But I don't. I will go through the painstaking steps to try to pinpoint the cause and accept whatever remediation is indicated. I also know and remember every day, that I am happy to still be alive. The odds weren't always with me living to this ripe old age. 

Like Petunia, I will persist. Some days all I can do is sit in the sun and enjoy the scent of grass and trees, marvel at the flocks of birds flying in formation, feel the breeze kiss my cheek, and be grateful for my life as it is.

Once and Future

I used to spar with my brother-in-law. We couldn't have been much more different, except that we were both writers who swam in the water of words and ideas. I, a staunch if not militant atheist and iconoclast, who enjoyed a little bear-poking. He, a born and bred southern evangelical preacher, up and coming in the world of young clergy, with plenty of followers and fans. We traded books and kept it friendly though I harbored doubts about his sincerity and he, no doubt, about my sanity.

Along about 2012, we had a long-distance discussion by email. I was in Iowa with my mother, visiting relatives. We got a bit more biting than usual and I fired off a simple retort to something he said, something I don't remember now. All I said was "Kinder, Kirche, Kűche"

“NO!” he responded.  Hitler and Nazi Germany were off-limits, beyond the pale. I was being hyperbolic and irresponsible to even suggest such a thing in regard to his chosen religious beliefs and politics. 

It made me stop for a bit. Was I? The theocratic world created by Margaret Atwood in A Handmaid's Tale still haunted me nearly twenty years after I first read the book. I strongly felt that his brand of Christianity, along with the Republican party, was trending that direction. It didn't feel inconceivable to me.

We let it slide and never brought it up again, but every so often I found myself reflecting on that nascent fear which he had so cavalierly  brushed away. Toward the end of his life, in the last lengthy conversation we had, he expressed his own doubts about the direction things were going, both politically and religiously. 

He died suddenly and unexpectedly at the age of 49. I still miss talking with him. It was through those conversations that I got some insight into the mind of one who was committed, by default and by intellect, to ideas that were antithetical to my own. It was bracing and underlain with acceptance of each other as worthy humans.

I rather wish he were still around to see what's happening today. How would he respond to the pandemic? He had a good and loving heart, even though he was beset by fears and failings, as we all are. I know he would be horrified to see what has become of his Republican party as the DOJ officers are deployed to the streets of American cities, as leadership has failed to make any but the faintest attempts to rein in a plague that is killing thousands of citizens, and "freedom of religion" is employed to disparage and curtail civil rights.

I have been homebound now since March 16, as have so many other people. I read the news and try to maintain some sort of hope that life will become easier, something resembling normal once again. I have the sinking feeling that won't happen. I fear that we are closer than ever to the loss of democratic norms that we have taken for granted. The authoritarianism that seemed possible but unlikely in 2016 becomes more realistic every day. 

I wish my dear, departed brother-in-law had been right. 

Kinder. Kirche. Kűche

You Moved How Many Times?

  

This was my home for the first 4 weeks.

I will soon be seventy years old, which blows my mind. This morning, while reading a biography of Louisa May Alcott and seeing that she moved around a great deal as a child, I decided to count up my moves. 

One of the things I realized as I made the list is that my memory does a lot more spinning than it used to as it tries to retrieve information. I can picture the little buffering circle going round and round. So I'm not sure I got them all, nor can I remember very many street names. 

The final count, in my just-short-of-70-years, is fifty-one. Five. One. Including a few instances of couch-surfing and camping out, which I never think of as homelessness even though I technically didn't have an address and had to use my grandparents' home address as mine. I never lived with my grandparents.

Evergreen, Colorado 1956

My parents moved quite a bit, every year or two, even once during the school year in spite of the fact that my father was a teacher. After they started teaching for the military dependent schools overseas, things actually settled down. Then everyone around us moved and we were in the same place for several years at a time.

Unlike Louisa, I didn't grow up with a fanatic father whose beliefs precluded him from working for wages or owning property ----- or eating regularly. My father was a musician, though, and an aspiring, frustrated concert pianist who always felt like his big break was around the next corner. If only he hadn't somehow saddled himself with a wife and four kids! So there are similarities. 

My sister Barb at our small, plain house - 1958

By the time I graduated from high school in Rota, Spain, I had attended 8 schools. I married at 18 and lighted out on a remarkable journey of geographical cures for anything and everything that ailed me. By the time I was 30, my lifetime score was up to 32 moves and still going. Thirty was a turning point, though. That's the year I got sober for good.

I've been in the same house now for 15 years. Jill and I bought separate new houses when we met and it took us three years to merge. We've been stable ever since.

Sometimes, I get itchy feet. Sometimes, I lunge at the internet looking for a place to move, a desirable house in a new city or country. I may never get over that urge to pack up and search for adventure. But it's different now. I love my wife and the house we live in. She has a hometown not far away with family and familiar places. Occasionally, I even want to move there and try to adopt her home since I've never had a hometown of my own. 

In the meantime, here we are growing older together in a house I still think of as brand new, though it was 2002 when she got it.  That's long enough to launch an entire kid from scratch! (we didn't.)

 

My children have houses of their own, and marriages and careers to go with them. They've been more geographically stable than I, despite my best efforts to haul them from pillar to post in the early years. 

Seventy, huh? That means what, fifteen or twenty years more? Twenty-five if I stretch it? Considering my grasshopper-wastrel days of yore, I'm already living on borrowed time. And here, in this house that is definitely a home, I have found a measure of peace I never expected to have. 

Feet on the ground, breathing the air. Who knew it could be like this?

Buddy and Nana

Are we there yet?

This morning, I heard an interview on NPR's Morning Edition with our very own North Carolina Sec. of Health, Mandy Cohen, MD. She's been diligently working with others in state government, especially the governor, trying to ride this bucking bronco of a pandemic since the beginning. 

The stay-at-home order was issued, businesses shuttered, or were severely restricted. The traffic dropped in Raleigh below the level it was when I first moved here in 1987. Not that I would know, mind you, since I wasn't going out. But we do back up to a well-used street.

At first, it was kind of a breathless adventure, like waiting for a hurricane. We received our bidet even before the shutdown. Prescient, no? We stocked up on canned goods and pet food, pasta, tuna, rice, popcicles and ice cream, too. 

I'm old-ish. Turning 70 this summer, with a few predisposing but controlled health conditions. Jill is on medication that negatively affects her immune system. My very part-time job has no prospect of starting up again soon. She works in a surgery center, assisting surgeons with mainly elective procedures. We both had loads of unexpected time on our hands. 

As the days turned to weeks some of us, (Ahem) settled into the slow pace and isolation while and others, (not naming names), had a bit more trouble with it. The yard received careful attention. I bought a new sewing machine and started making masks to give away. The three bird identification books that sit on the kitchen windowsill got a workout. All in all, it was a novelty. Not bad, we congratulated ourselves. But then...

In the OUT THERE, protests began. Unmasked throngs descended on downtown hollering and carrying on. Even though we live right here in the state capital, we witnessed it on screen like everybody else. "Crazy" we agreed. "Do they want to die?"

What happened? Was it the protests against the shutdown? The people carrying guns in the streets of downtown? Was it boredom or short attention spans? Too many people out of work and scared for the future? Maybe it was just the call of summer. Suddenly, people were over it. 

LET THE OPENING BEGIN!

Are we there yet? No, assuredly not. All those carefully tracked numbers are rising inexorably. Cases, hospitalizations, and deaths are going up here in NC, across the US, around the world. This ain't over yet, not by a long shot. 

So I'm hunkered down. It's hard to make myself answer the phone. I'm getting a lot of writing done and will likely publish two new books this fall. My house isn't much cleaner, I'm having trouble distancing from the fridge, sometimes I stare blankly at the wall wondering what to do next. But I've learned the difference between house sparrows, song sparrows, and chipping sparrows. I've held a lost Carolina Chickadee baby in my hand. I've taken naps and learned new pieces on the piano, put together some puzzles, read lots of books, and listened to sooooo many podcasts.

We're not there yet. Maybe we never will be. But one way or another, life is still good.

Grandma, what did you do in the plague?

My paternal grandmother, Ida, spent two years in a tuberculosis sanitarium in the early 1930s. It was in Ottumwa, Iowa, and it no longer exists. My father was six when she got sick. Ida's sister, Anna, took care of the family. That's what families do.

Years later, in 1967, I lived in Spain and was diagnosed with TB and treated for a year with medication and monitoring. Since then, I've gone for periodic rechecks and there's been no recurrence. Unlike my grandmother, I didn't have to be held in a sanitarium away from my family and normal activities. Advances in medicine, I guess. 

This time of plague has brought up reminders. TB patients, according to what I've read, were plied with lots of fresh air, even sleeping on open porches in all weather. I've spent much of each day on the deck during this time. It has been a balm to my mind and spirit and, perhaps, I'm channeling Ida.

I am acutely aware of the privilege I have during this pandemic. A house, first of all, with electricity, hot and cold running water, food, and the internet --- don't forget the internet! My wife and I find we enjoy each other's company and not a single spat has arisen. After 18 years together, we've been through enough counseling and hard times that we've learned to be gentle with one another. Also, we leave each other alone for our personal pursuits in the same house.

One of the underlying complaints I glean from what I read online is a feeling that this "shouldn't" be happening. As if life in modern America should not be subject to such an indignity as infectious disease. "It's not FAIR!"

No, but it's real life and how we respond is what matters most. Do we abandon our values of compassion in favor of some sort of "every man for himself and the devil take the hindmost" philosophy? That seems to be rearing itself in some quarters.

Or do we take this for the challenge it is, put hearts, minds, and strength to bear in acknowledging the stark reality and solving it the best we can? 

Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, and even God will not bail us out. This is our collective moment and everyone has a part to play, even if it is just staying home or wearing a mask to the grocery store. 

My son is an ER doc. His job is well-defined and he is in my thoughts every single day. My wife is a Surgical Tech; she's got 35 years of familiarity with PPE. Thousands and thousands of regular people, sons, daughters, wives, husbands, go to work each day and face unknown risks. The best way you and I can support them is to stop the spread of disease.

Me, I may be getting old and retired, but I'm still kicking it right here at home, writing stories, sewing masks, checking in on friends and family by phone and computer. I may not be on the front lines, but I'm doing my part. So can you.

Sew the masks!

My great-grandmother, Ava Vista Cramer Ewers

It's a time-honored tradition, women supporting the war effort with fabric creations. Civil War -- rolling bandages. WWI -- knitting socks. WWII -- making and selling quilts for the Red Cross, all this and so much more. In times of war and national disasters, even before women were common in the workforce, organized efforts brought the traditional domestic skills of women into production for the greater good.

Now we see people making protective equipment to deal with the Covid-19 pandemic. Across Youtube and all platforms of social media, patterns, encouragement, and videos are shared. While we don't have the social aspect of physical sewing circles (with tea and cookies, no doubt) pictures and stories are widely distributed online. And yes, the needle arts are still produced mainly by women. 

At one time, I was a moderately skilled seamstress. I learned to sew on the machine in seventh grade, though my mother had instructed me in hand-sewing and embroidery from about the age of six. I'm very grateful to Miss Miles, my Home Ec teacher at Bremerhaven American High School in Germany. First semester of 7th grade we made aprons. Of course, we did. It was 1962. My mother's best friend, Joan Lindquist Flory, was an extraordinary seamstress. She guided me through shopping for fabric, provided tools and instruction and didn't even scold me when the jumper I made turned out so odd. I had pre-shrunk the dress material but not the lining. Bad move. 

I never developed my skills to a professional level, but I made many of my clothes in high school and college, including my prom dress in 10th grade. 

When I worked as a historic interpreter at a 19th Century farm in Illinois, I sewed all my own period clothing as well as my daughter's. Later, for my business, I spent fourteen years running around the wilds of North Carolina taking history programs to classrooms. My work clothes were the ones I made, the dresses, aprons, hats, cloaks, petticoats, corsets and drawers of a farm woman 150 years earlier. There was always something that needed to be replaced or repaired.

My parents gave me a sturdy, turquoise, metal Singer for graduation from high school in 1968. It stood the test of time right up through December when I made a new Christmas stocking for my brother. When I called it into service in February it had given up the ghost. Maybe it could be revived but I decided it was time for a new one. I don't sew much anymore, a little quilting, incidental costumes, mending and hemming. My fingers don't work as well as they used to; after 5 hand surgeries, they're not what they once were. Kind of like my old sewing machine.

I ordered a low end, light-weight machine online and got it last week. Now I'm starting to make masks. Jill wants me to make head coverings she can wear in the operating room. I'd like to make a busy-apron for my mother-in-law who has dementia. It feels good to sew on a smooth machine that has way more bells and whistles than the old one could have dreamed of.

So I'll take my place in the tradition of women responders, wielding needle and thread in service to others despite the on-going controversy about whether or when face masks are useful. It's what we do and it sure beats housework!

Not my first rodeo

Apprehension. That's the feeling in the morning when I first open my computer to look at the news. What happened while I was asleep? You do it too, don't you?

It's almost palpable, the feeling that something dreadful is going to happen and there is no way to stop it. It's like a hurricane, with pictures on the screen to track its advance. When will it hit and how bad will it be? That's what the news is like today.

And yet, it's not the first time the world has felt topsy-turvy. A half-century ago it felt much the same, for many of the same reasons. Power, greed, autocratic rule. As different as the world is today, those human traits persist and rise up every generation or so. 

In 1968, when I graduated from high school, the US was in turmoil. Assassinations, riots, cities were burning, people marched in the streets. This was the America I returned to after living in Europe for 8 years.

Fifty years ago now, I was a recently married 19-year-old student at the University of Illinois. Tom and I met in Rota, Spain on the Navy base where I lived. He was a sailor, I was in high school. We had all of the aspirations and excitement of young lovers everywhere, despite the world around us. 

Our campus, that spring semester of 1970, was alive with protest against the war, against atrocities foreign and domestic. The National Guard marched down the middle of the street in front of our shabby, store-front student apartment. They marched on the quad and in front of buildings, carrying guns, herding students willy-nilly, protesters or not. The men in uniform were no older than the students, but they had the firepower and it was during that semester, on the campuses of Kent State and Mississippi State that they used them. They killed college students, black and white, because the world was upside down.

We were sure The Revolution was upon us. How could it not be? They were shooting and bludgeoning citizens in the streets. The powers of government were arrayed with deadly force against the people. Our leaders were being killed. Cities burned. Nobody was listening, all was chaos.

Tom and I left for Canada. He had done his four years in the US Navy but this didn't feel like a country he would ever defend. We lived for three months in a tent, in basements of churches for refugees and were sometimes taken into the homes of lovely Canadian grandmas. We weren't the only ones who left. We were probably not the only ones to come back.

The Revolution didn't happen then, but there was still a war to rise against, civil rights to demand, a corrupt government to deal with. 

You may have noticed that everything has not turned to roses and rainbows since 1970. Once again, we are in a state of upheaval. People have taken to the streets and will again. After all these years, my protesting chops are a little rusty but still, I march and chant with the young people. I write letters and emails, pick up the phone, canvass door to door. I just might not drive at night.

When the world is topsy-turvy and the malignant powers-that-be are in ascendence, what else is there to do but join together and assert that love and justice matter? 

You Call this Christmas?

December 1968: Schiller College, Germany

It was cold and I was excited to be going back to my family and my sailor boyfriend on the Navy base in Rota, Spain. Warm weather, Christmas cheer, parties. I'd just been back for Thanksgiving, so I knew the drill -- travel orders, passport, space-available military flight from Rhein Main in Frankfurt. Easy peasy.

The dorms closed and I took the train to Frankfurt. The terminal was packed with GIs trying to get home for Christmas. It was wall-to-wall uniforms. Just the way I liked it! Everything was great until I discovered I didn't have my passport. 

It had to be in my dorm room at school. I got on the phone and found that I could get in to look for it, but I didn't have money for train fare. One of the guys hitchhiked back to school with me and we turned my room upside down before getting word through a frantic trans-atlantic call that one of my housemates had accidentally taken it with her --- to Florida. No passport, no trip home to Spain. I would have to go to the American consulate in Frankfurt and try to get a temporary one.

My new friend sprang for a train ride for both of us. I put my plea in at the Consulate but found that everything was shutting down for the holidays. There would be no hope of getting the new passport until they reopened after Christmas. 

Back at the terminal, I fell in with a group of guys, me in my cute little mini smock-dress and my backpack. I had all the attention and admiration I could soak up. They bought me food and drinks, entertained me with stories and jokes, and at night they surrounded me while I slept on the floor --- to fend off the wolves, they assured me.

One by one my companions said good-bye and boarded planes for the States. By the end of Christmas Eve there was almost nobody left except a skeleton crew in the snack bar and in the office. Christmas Day I spent reading my book and had an ersatz Christmas dinner (sort of turkey or chicken?) in the snack bar with the kitchen workers. At least they let me have it for free.

Things powered up again on the 26th and flights began to leave. Space Available is always chancey, and I got bumped twice. The officer who bumped me the second time felt sorry as I stood there crying, and gave me a $20 bill. That was a lot of money in 1968. It didn't get me home that day, but it did mean I could have whatever I wanted in the snack bar.

Finally, on the 27th, newly minted temporary passport in hand, I was on the way to Rota Naval Station on a C140 transport. Seats? Naw, just the netting along the sides with lots of enormous containers down the center. But I got a box lunch to eat on the way. 

My first Christmas away from home felt like a disaster at the time. I missed my family terribly. I had felt all grown up when I went off to college, but there was no place I wanted to be more than around the Christmas tree with my parents and sisters and brother on that December 25th.

By the following Christmas, I had married that sailor boyfriend and we celebrated our first holidays together at his new base. It was many years before I spent another Christmas with my entire family. 2019 marks my 70th Christmas on the planet, but none has stood out like that first lonely Christmas in the airport.

Daily Production

For most of my life, all I wanted to do was read. As a kid, I was the one curled up in my room with a book. If mom sent us outside to play, I took Nancy Drew with me. And you best believe I still have something to read in the car, an honest-to-goodness paperback volume of short stories, just in case I get stuck in a blizzard with no cell service. Boots, a blanket, and a book. Not that blizzards are common in the piedmont of North Carolina. But you never know.

Now I'm 3/4 retired and I could read as much as I want, but there's a loud and insistent voice in my head that says NO! I should be productive, I should be working on something significant like mopping floors or cleaning out closets or painting the kitchen. I should be writing on the two books that are underway, practicing the piano, or at least doing laundry.  And there's always the office that is knee-deep in files and folders, photos and stacks of papers that need to be organized. 

Sitting and reading; what a waste of time.

I used to dream about retirement, how long and luxurious the days would be. No interruptions. Deciding from one moment to the next what I would do. It's not like that, at least not often enough. 

Aside from Jill's studio, which is filled with art, every room in our house has books, shelves and shelves of books, many of them never read ---- yet. I have books bought at auctions and used book stores. There's a bookcase filled with musty volumes from my parents and grandparents. My office and upstairs house research materials, writing and reference books, classics and mysteries and paperback novels.  Author friends have expanded my collection and Amazon provides innumerable selections not available in the library. 

It's one thing to collect them and another to make time to read. When I do, as absorbing and exciting as a text may be, the niggling guilt often overtakes me and I jump up mid-chapter to put in a load of clothes, start supper, feed the dogs, clean the bathroom. 

Here's the question, if not now, when? I'm 69 years old. No promises anymore; I could come to a halt any old time or hang on for 30 more years. Those books gathering dust on the shelves will outlive me either way. 

To read or not read?

I choose a book.

Between spaces

Where do you go when you sleep?

I've long been fascinated by the betweens. Dreams. Pretend. Reverie. Hallucination. What is the difference between vivid sleeping dreams and hallucination?

When I was in sixth grade, I used to get in trouble for daydreaming in school. My teacher, Mrs. Patrick, was strict but I liked her. We had just moved from the small towns of rural Iowa and fetched up in Germany on an Army base. It was 1961. Everything familiar was gone; I didn't even have favorite objects because our household goods hadn't arrived.

My desk was one row over from the windows because of course, we sat in rows. I gazed out the windows that overlooked the playground and grassy space and fell into deep thought. Mrs. Patrick thought I was dawdling; I knew if I didn't "daydream" I would cry.

People who dwell in imagination, children or adults, are often accused of being out of touch with reality. Lazy, head in the clouds, not all there. You've heard the words, whether they apply to you or not. "Why can't you just pay attention?" "Snap out of it!"

The netherworld I occupied most often was found between the covers of a book. It was there that new worlds opened and I could travel to distant times and places. It's a bit of a chicken and egg question: did I begin to dream because of the stories I read and those read to me, or did the stories I encountered mirror my innate inclinations?

I've reached a point in life in which I can dream more freely, just as my ambitions and "real world" options seem to be narrowing. In that regard, it's much like childhood. I have more agency now, and the ability to call my own shots. Nobody is going to move me from one continent to another without consultation. Perhaps that lack of decision-making gives rise to a rich childhood imagination for some kids like me.

I love being asleep because of the vivid dreams that come to me. At the same time, I resist going to sleep because being awake is so interesting and I'm afraid I'll miss something. So I stay awake "past my bedtime" (sorry, Mommy) and fall into a colorful panoply of stories and actors that I then resist waking from.

I've often heard people say they don't dream when they sleep. I don't know the physiology of that because I don't understand the mechanism of dreaming. But it's surprising to me how often that pronouncement is made with pride.

"I don't dream." (subtext: dreaming is a namby-pamby waste of brain power)
These are often the same folks who brag about only needing four hours of sleep a night. Hmmm. Is there a connection?

Me, I have taken to sleeping 8-10 hours a night and spending so much time in dreams that sometimes I can't remember what's real and what I dreamed. With my background of two parents with Alzheimer's Disease, that can be troubling, but there's no sense worrying. In the meantime, I reap the benefits by waking up with stories buzzing around in my head waiting to be written down.

Next year, ten short months from now, I will turn 70. Just as childhood is a time of rapid growth and change, I feel like this time of life is filled with questions and answers I would not have anticipated. As my body begins to change in ways I don't approve of, I find myself renewing my acquaintance with the pastimes and enchantments of my youth. I may not travel the world in real life -- too expensive, too difficult -- but I am once again loose in the liminal world between worlds and it's a welcome return.

Mom reading a bedtime story on the picnic table.

I'm My Own GPS

I live in a medium-sized city that's growing rapidly. That means more traffic, seemingly every day. Since I've been here more than thirty years urging the powers that be to pull the ropes up and stop the hordes of newcomers, I've watched it all happen, much to my dismay. Oh, I know. Growth is good. Progress, and all that. But when you start getting lost in your own town, things have gone too far.

This morning, I went to the dentist. I've been seeing him for years and he's by far my favorite dentist ever. Over time, I've learned to tack on more travel time so I could always be prompt, but since I only see him every six months things can change. He's clear across town. I know how to get there; I'm not directionally challenged and this is my home turf. 

I ran into traffic, the kind of traffic that stops across intersections and is three lanes wide as the lights blink ineffectually from red to yellow to green. Probably a wreck, maybe construction, whatever it was my mental GPS started to recalculate.

I zipped through neighborhoods avoiding crosswalk baby carriages and school zones. I wound my way across town only having to turn around in someone's driveway once. I discovered corner lots where the trees have been felled and a shiny new gas station+car wash or a "Welcome All" warehouse church grew up. Where do the birds and squirrels go?

I got to my appointment only a few minutes late but it made me think about how I got there. I was proud of myself for not having to consult the voice in the phone. I can still find my way. But the changes were startling. Sometimes, I drive familiar routes and find from one week to the next that trees or buildings have been removed and I'm momentarily disoriented. Where am I again? Is this the corner I thought it was?

Maybe I'm just getting old and senile. That's always a possibility. The old part is a definite but I think most of my faculties are still intact. I understand more about why older people talk (or complain) about "how things used to be." The longer I'm on the planet and the longer I stay in one locale, the more noticeable the changes are.

Yesterday was the anniversary of 9/11. Again. It happens every year. The eighteenth seems significant because the babies being born back then are pretty nearly grown now. There is a cohort of young people who have no memory of that day. It happens all the time, the national events of one generation become hazy history for the next. 

Whether it's D-Day or Kennedy's death, the Challenger or 9/11, all become faded with time as fewer people have direct memories of them. The same is true close to home, in the lives of all of us. Hometowns enlarge or shrink, a childhood house is torn down, cherished people die. The biggest celebrities, the most powerful politicians, wealthiest, most beautiful, most talented people all slip from prominence and fade away.

If you were to ask me for directions, I might be inclined to tell you to turn at the next road after where the K-Mart was that got blown down by the tornado. Or go to the Bojangles where the little post office used to be like I told my wife the other day. Except it turned out the Bojangles wasn't there either and had been replaced by a sketchy convenience store.

Change. I don't think I'll ever catch up.

My old house where I raised kids, now boarded up to be demolished.

Alas, Rejection

I was rejected last week. Excluded. Summarily dismissed. Kicked to the curb.

I had enrolled in a research study last year, a one-off, as far as I knew. I went to Chapel Hill to the EPA building and spent two hours being consented, ---- who knew that could be a verb? ----answering questions on the computer and being questioned in by a researcher. He turned me over to the nurse and I submitted to collection of blood and saliva as well as other medical measurements. It was largely painless and I enjoyed the people who were involved. At the end, they sent me to the bursar, I was given a check, and I went my merry way.

Now, nine months later, I got a call asking if I wanted to participate in a follow-up. It would mean three trips to Chapel Hill over 8 months and some questionnaires and saliva collection at home once a month. The purpose of all this was to measure specific markers that might be associated with air quality. I was in the right zip code and my previous participation marked me as a good candidate. It would pay $420, a sum that greatly added to its appeal. I felt comfortable and was glad I could add my little part to this research effort.

All went well until we reached the clinical part. It started going south immediately when she took my temp and found it was slightly elevated. Hmmmm. Then my blood pressure was much higher than normal, another glitch. We proceeded through a couple of other measurements, laughing and joking as we went. I mentioned that I’d had a pulmonary embolism in November and was scheduled for a stress-echo the next day, which made her frown. I climbed up on the table and she prepared to draw blood. Since the PE, I’ve been on a blood thinner, which concerned her about the blood draw.

She stuck me once. No blood. She switched to the other arm and still not enough to make a difference. With many apologies, she tried one more time with no result. It seemed I was all dried up. It was then that she told me that all these things meant I would probably be excluded from the study. She talked to the research guy in charge and sure enough, I was out. They sent me to the bursar for a check to cover what I had done and I was sent on my way.

I was surprised at how it made me feel. Driving home, tears welled, blurring my vision. It wasn’t the money, it was rejection. I was disappointed. It reminded me of being laughed at or left behind in grade school. I felt like a failure, not good enough. I went home and, against my better judgment, ate some ice cream and went to bed for a two-hour afternoon nap.

Some things echo for a long time, I guess. 

And I need to stay hydrated.

Confessions of a Political Naif

I saw recently that Lyndon LaRouche had died. Hard to believe he reached the ripe old age of 96.

Mr. LaRouche played an unwitting part in my development of critical thinking and political awareness. It was he who taught me to actually read and think before voting.

I suppose it was in the 1980s, back when I lived in Illinois. Backers of the LaRouche movement or party, however you want to characterize it, secured many spots on the primary ballot for statewide offices. I'd heard his name bandied about in the media and thought the ideas he espoused were abhorrent. I knew I would never vote for such a man. 

What I didn't know, and was not revealed on the ballot, was that a whole herd of LaRoucheites was running. They had refreshingly "normal" names, easy to read, familiar as the people next door. A few were even women, which appealed to me greatly. When the primary election rolled around I hied me to the polls and blithely marked the ballot for all the women and people with names I could pronounce, without knowing anything about them. 

When the results tumbled in over the next day or two, I was horrified to realize that I had helped advance many of Lyndon LaRouche's favored candidates to the general election. I did that. I was responsible for these batshit crazies being put before the electorate and likely being put in office in the fall. It was my fault.

Between the primary and the general, I educated myself. I hadn't been the only one to succumb to that level of ignorance and laziness. It was a well-thought-out tactic on the part of LaRouche and his henchmen. They read the voters and I was one of them. It was the last time I went to the polls without arming myself ahead of time with enough information to make a reasonable choice.

I've nearly always voted. A few times I missed or sat out an election when I was out of the country or between residences. Other than that, I've cast my ballot in every election I could, beginning with the 1972 primary when I was finally old enough to vote. I had just turned 21, which was the voting age until it was lowered to 18 in July 1971. I proudly cast my vote for the presidential candidate, Shirley Chisolm. I had read and heard about her. Did I research the other candidates on that ballot? No, I just voted for all the Socialist Worker Party candidates and filled in with Democrats and women where needed. 

Moral of the Story: Don't vote unless you know who you're voting for! Political parties, TV personalities, social media buzz, and familiar names don't mean a thing if the politico in question is a charlatan. Dig deep and then VOTE! ---- every time they crack the door at the polling station.

Once upon a time in Gibraltar

Fifty years ago today, I was a bride. I was eighteen years old.

The love of my young life was a sailor stationed aboard the USS Canopus in Rota, Spain. I was a high school senior when we met. To me, it felt like a match made in heaven. He was six years older, gorgeous, worldly, smart, artistic, and divorced. That's why we went to Gibraltar to marry. It was 1969 and Franco was in power in Spain. Divorced people were not allowed to marry on Spanish soil, not even on an American military base in the base chapel. So we set out for British soil where they weren't so picky about such things.

As it happened, it was a Monday and the people who were married just before the weekend in the same office, by the same somewhat elderly, very British official, were John Lennon and Yoko Ono. Not that we saw them. But they did scandalize the officiating bureaucrat by showing up barefoot which he described with much indignation. Heaven forfend.

There is no remaining photographic evidence of our nuptials. They were lost somewhere in my parents' move from Spain to England. Nonetheless, I remember some small details. I was shocked to see myself referred to as a "spinster" on the marriage certificate. I did not like the dress I was wearing. It had been purchased for my HS graduation from the Base Exchange and was brown and white. Who wants to get married in brown? Was it an omen?

My family toasted us at a Chinese restaurant afterward, a treat not available where we lived. Altogether, it was a long and happy day. We took a train to Madrid for our wedding night, followed by a honeymoon hitchhiking through Spain and Morocco.

Fifty years is a long time whether or not a marriage lasts. And a relationship can outlive a marriage by a long shot. We had a son after 5 years and split up when he was a baby. Ever after, we've all been family. New marriages, more kids, many moves and life's vicissitudes haven't changed the fact that once upon a time there was love. And marriage. And fun.

I'm lucky to have had many lives in this one incarnation. 

Welcome Back, Kiddo!

I'm going to pretend I haven't been missing in action for the past nine months. I invite you to do the same.

The last time I wrote it was about protest, poverty, and education. There was a great deal of energy behind those issues nine months ago. I hope it's still simmering beneath the surface. In Trump time, nine months is somewhere between nine years and infinity.

I have had to look at my addiction to the news. Being retired and only working seven hours a week, I have a lot of time to get into mischief. Five days a week, I start my day by having coffee with Rachel. You know, the smartest talking head on cable tv. I rely on her to take apart the difficult issues and explain them in detail. Then, she calls in experts, legal and otherwise, to explain them some more. The teacher in me appreciates how thorough she is.

If there's time before work I switch to lighter fare, Seth Myers or Trevor Noah, for some short takes that will make me laugh while I eat my yogurt and fruit. If it's a work day, I'm ready to get out there and see my favorite senior citizens.

The best part of my little retirement job is the students I teach. No lesson plans; I teach the same two Qigong sets over and over. But each day is different because of the people I'm with. This meditative practice brings a measure of peace and centering as we keep all our moving-parts moving. 

If you're not over sixty-five, you might not understand the ways your body begins to sabotage you. Every morning is a new opportunity to wake up with a stitch in your back or new creaks in your knees. Pains come and go, or sometimes come and don't go. Things you took for granted all your life suddenly need more attention, like slowing down so your feet don't get out ahead of the rest of you. Or paying attention to what you're doing without distractions. Multi-tasking can spell disaster. And lost keys.

Slowing down to pay attention has lengthened my days. Learning to breathe, to focus on the present and appreciate what I see, are side effects of this Qigong practice. Or maybe the whole point.

One of the blessings of aging is that competition falls away. When you know too many people who have already died, every day is a blessing.


As I watch entirely too many videos of politicians, read too many news stories, try to keep all the Russian names straight, and spend too much time on twitter, I try to balance it out with focus. Breath. Movement. And laughing with my seven classes of folks who used to be strangers and now are people I treasure. 

All of us are in this together. Worry doesn't help. Time to breathe as one, relax, and love what is right before us.

Unexpected goat love.

Why I March

Teachers took to the streets on May 16 in North Carolina. It's been a long, hard decade for education since the economic meltdown. When the state legislature and governor's mansion changed hands, things became grim indeed. They've never recovered and now public schools feel under attack from all sides.

I started this blog when I left the classroom in 2011. The changes were already apparent. Raises were a distant memory. Classroom budgets diminished and I found myself spending more of my own money and tapping parents for basics. I hear it got a whole lot worse after I left teaching. Retirement gave me some distance but I still talk to friends I left behind.

This has been a week of public protest. On May 14, the Poor People's Campaign kicked off with direct action and civil disobedience in more than thirty cities across the country. Raleigh was one of them. The crowd was small compared to the Moral Mondays from a few years ago, but the issues are the same. Poverty, racism, healthcare, living wage, education. People are coming together.

These two actions back-to-back have had me thinking. They are so intertwined, poverty and education. I think back to my days in the classroom and the poverty that was evidenced every day in our school.

It wasn't one of those terrible schools you see pictured on the documentaries. Actually, the building was sound and recently renovated. The school staff was caring and dedicated. It stands in a neighborhood whose residents often struggle. Many of the 6 to 8-year-olds I taught showed signs of stress.

I remember one little boy who, after being given a toothbrush by the visiting dental educators was thrilled because he had his own now and wouldn't have to share a toothbrush with his siblings.

I regularly had children who were underdressed for the weather or showed up in clothes that hadn't been washed recently. Some came to school too late for breakfast and arrived hungry almost every day. Some whispered that they hadn't eaten any supper the night before. I kept large bags of cereal behind my desk and cheese crackers in the closet for such situations. 

Sometimes they would go through the lunch line only to find that their account was empty. I wasn't the only teacher or teacher-assistant who kept extra money on account to cover those lunches.

Serious behavior problems arose. A few times I had to report suspicion of abuse. More often, a child would "act out" unaccountably, hiding under a table or crying and rocking inconsolably. I made many referrals to our overburdened counselors or assistant principal. 

Our school had a burgeoning population of Spanish-speaking students during the years I was there. Despite the language barriers with both the children and their parents we managed, and all of us grew together. What I did not anticipate were the problems particular to immigrant families. There was the boy who took everything home every night because this was the third school he had attended during the current year. Sure enough, one day he simply never came back. When one of my little girls confided that her daddy had been taken away and had to go back to Mexico, I was stunned. She was devastated. My heart broke for her.

Too many of these kids had to deal with situations that would have been unthinkable to me as a child: the boy who was going out to dinner to celebrate his dad's birthday but they ended up at the ER after the girlfriend stabbed his father, the girl who came to school one morning talking about the man who had been shot dead at the end of her driveway the night before, the number of kids who lived with grandparents or other relatives because their parents were on drugs or locked up, the child who had to get up before dawn to ride with his taxi-driving mother until time to go to school.

Poverty. I thought I knew about it. I had been on welfare and food stamps when my son was an infant. I had scrounged and worked multiple low wage jobs to hold body and soul together. But I realized it was a whole different level of experience the day I tried to teach a sequencing lesson to one of my first-graders.

I spread out six brightly colored picture cards entitled "How to make a Bed." His task was to put them in order. He hesitated then moved the cards around, obviously guessing. I gave him hints, but it didn't help. Finally, he told me he didn't know. He had never had a bed. He slept on the couch or the floor in a sleeping bag.

 Poverty and Education. That's why I march.

Poor People's Campaign, Raleigh NC, 5/14/2018

Sudden Change

Jill and Todd

Jill and I are in the pause, the hush and intake of breath that follows a sudden death. Yesterday, her brother Todd died unexpectedly. He was only 49 years old. The stillness is intense.

We all do it, I think. We chug through life doing what needs to be done, following routines and prescribed roles day after day. There's comfort in the mundane --- grocery shopping, laundry, lawn mowing, jobs. Even with the certainty that nothing stays the same for long, we walk through days and weeks as though today is the permanent blueprint. Until it isn't.

The phone call marks a break. There was before and then there is after. Before was normal. After, unpredictable. It takes time to adjust, as though the molecules have rearranged themselves into a new shape that is not recognizable in this moment. 

Previous losses crowd to the top, loosed from their moorings once more, adding to the sense of disorientation. It's easy to stand for minutes with the refrigerator door open, unseeing, lost in thought. Dogs nudge questioningly, aware that something is amiss. Conversations lapse in mid-sentence.

Gradually, it fills in again, the empty spaces begin to shrink but never disappear entirely. The sudden impulse to text or send a picture doesn't hit as sharply over time. 

"He would love that . . ."

"She never got to see . . ."

A sudden scent or sound triggers memories that flood through, stabs of pain, then cleansed and washed away.

Farewell. You leave a self behind that will not be erased in the minds and hearts of those who knew you. Sleep well, Todd, and be at peace. 

                                                                                    Todd Hahn 1968-2018

Band-aids and Ice

Back in the golden, olden days of television, there was a show called WKRP in Cincinnati. Of the many memorable characters on this sitcom, a favorite of mine was Les Nessman, played by Richard Sanders. Les nearly always wore a band-aid. Most of the time it had nothing to do with the action; it was his schtick. That tickled my funny bone and it reminded me of being a kid.

My parents convinced us that band-aids could treat almost anything. Fall down and skin a knee? Wash with soap and water (ouch!), apply Mercurochrome (ouch!) or Merthiolate (double ouch!) and top with a band-aid. The injury didn't even have to involve broken skin. Come crying to Mom with a bump or bruise and she would give it a little rub or a kiss, and a band-aid. A goose-egg might bring out the waterproof pouch with the screw-on cap, filled with ice to relieve pain and swelling before the curative band-aid was applied.

Those strips were 1950s magic. Some of you who are old enough may remember that they came in metal containers with a hinged lid. The crackly wrapper on the strip itself was opened hygienically by pulling an orange thread down the side. No touching the sterile pad!

By the time I settled into classroom teaching in the early 2000s, late in my education career, the fear of litigation meant that we had returned to fifty years earlier when it came to children's daily scrapes. School nurses were few and far between; first aid consisted of band-aids and ice.

We sometimes speak of "slapping a Band-aid on it" when we treat problems with stop-gap measures. In business or politics, complex issues are often addressed in superficial ways to relieve the pressure of public opinion and put off effective examination or remedies for another day.

A band-aid won't cure a broken arm nor will feel-good legislation, however well-intentioned, bring relief to problems endemic to the society we've created. I have been reminded lately of the "common good" and the responsibility we have for each other. In times when the wider world seems fraught with conflict and dangers which I can do nothing about, my actions need to be directed close to home.

More than ever, I am called upon to be mindful, kind, and respectful. It may seem inadequate in the face of turmoil and uncertainty, but a well-placed band-aid and a kiss can create peace that angry words and hopelessness will never accomplish.

I wish you peace and serenity, whoever and wherever you are. We're all in this together.

Hello? Hello? Is this thing on?

I'm sorry. I haven't been able to write. My office was taken over by wild animals. You know how that goes.

Actually, I have spent so much time reading what other people have to say that my own thoughts and ideas got pushed out of the way. In other words, overwhelm to the Nth degree. I can't seem to stay off the news sites but all that reading leaves me with a twitchy eye and low-level depression. Not to mention too much ice cream and coffee. So, I have decided to take myself in hand and shake it off!

What do you want to talk about? No, not politics. Or Trump and his many henchmen. I could show you pretty pictures from vacationing in the Azores. 

That's the other old broad mentioned in the title of this blog.

 What's that? You don't know where (or maybe what) the Azores are? If I let you in on the secret do you promise not to tell and spoil this amazing paradise? Mum's the word. Look it up.

I could tell you about the novel I just published, which you can look for on Amazon and Kindle. But you should really read the other two first, since it's #3 in a series. Go ahead and look for Gaddy's Song.

Or #1 Way Out in Dog Heaven or #2 Haints in the Side Yard.

Haints are ghosts, for those of you not acquainted with southern vernacular. I'm beginning to think I've spent too much time with the specters. I'm noticing that when I am alone in the house, and sometimes even with others here, I detect the sweet, comforting scent of cherry pipe tobacco. A long time ago, when I was 11 or 12 and we had just moved to Germany, Dad went through a streak of smoking pipes. I think he liked the idea more than the actuality, but he acquired several handcrafted German pipes and a pipe stand and a humidor. I even saved up money to buy him a pipe one Christmas. I loved the smell of the tobacco and the smoke. Now I'm haunted by it, 14 years after his death.

It's not the first time I've been haunted by odors particular to my father's life. When we were clearing out the last house he and Mom lived in, the scent of bourbon wafted in the hallway and his bedroom. He was not a big drinker but enjoyed a party like the rest of us. Nobody had been in the house for awhile and it had already been five years since he died. But it was as clear as anything that he was raising a glass to the change that was underway. 



This time of year, I'm much more likely to remember my mother. It will be 3 years on December 15 since she passed on, Ella Fitzgerald singing her to the next world, Christmas lights and scents spiriting her away. 

Every year, through Advent season, we have a family tradition of lighting candles on the wreath and reading A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, one stave each week of Advent. This instructive ghost story is an annual reminder to live in the moment at hand, but also remember the past. The older I get, the more ghosts there are who inhabit my world. These ghosts of Christmas past aren't scary at all; my life is richer for their presence. And when they come bearing sensory gifts, so much the better.

Nancy, Lester, and all the rest ---- it's time to feast and celebrate. The love deepens with every passing year.

The Azore islands are Portuguese. 

Beautiful, secluded, magical.