Nobody Told Me

Nobody told me that my car keys would develop a life of their own and take off exactly when I need them.

Nobody told me that putting an electric mattress pad on my bed—running all those cords underneath--and changing the sheets could turn into a real workout.

Nobody told me that to be able to drive to an unfamiliar destination at night would require a reconnaissance excursion in daylight.

Nobody told me that in spite of having gained only five pounds since college graduation, my navel would disappear into a tummy I am only just getting used to.

Nobody told me that a text from one of my adult grandchildren would set me up for the day. Nobody told me I would learn how to text!

Nobody told me that an hour of concentrated exercising would put me on the couch for the afternoon: that pacing myself would become an imperative.

Nobody told me that watching friends become increasingly infirm and die would be like watching the leaves fall from the trees in autumn, generating in my heart an existential sadness interspersed with sudden stabs of grief.

Nobody told me that the ending years of my life would be spent almost entirely with wonderful women.

Nobody told me that over time my butt would pack up and depart, leaving my trousers to dribble around on the tops of my shoes.

Nobody told me that the sight of my older sister, her oxygen tank slung over her shoulder, trudging slowly upstairs, stopping on every other rise to catch her breath, would bring tears to my eyes.

Nobody told me that my creative, quick-witted younger brother, riddled now with cancer, would, as a result of his recent “milder” chemo, spike a neutropenic fever, lose all his muscle strength, be hospitalized and cease to know where he is.

Nobody told me that from time to time I would find myself shaded by a shadow of survivor guilt while, simultaneously pulsing with gratitude for my good health.

Painting by Brandon Stoddard

And nobody told me that we would plow through these rough waters with everything we’ve got.

Everybody Outside!

“I am the breakfast cook!” my youngest son, Jonce, announces with a grin on a recent October Sunday. “Anything you want: eggs, bacon, yogurt, berries granola, pancakes with chocolate chips or bananas? You name it; I’ll make it.”

Jonce is wearing a bathrobe made of bright white toweling and beat-up slippers; his wavy gray hair is tousled.

I am dressed. Ready for the day. “Great!” I say. “I’m for the granola, berries and yogurt and maybe I’ll have one pancake when you do some for the kids.”

“This granola is really good, Mom,” he tells me. “You’ll like it.”

“Coffee?” he offers. “I can make you some decaf?”

“Perfect.”

Gradually the kids appear. Lock, at thirteen, is growing like a weed, his body catching up with his already large hands and feet. He is ardent about Lacrosse and sports in general—a passion he shares with his father. His sister, Maggie, at 15, is blonde and blue-eyed, a competitive rider and also taking three AP courses as a high school sophomore.

My daughter-in-law, Janice, arrives in the kitchen, her coffee already in hand. She is a partner in a vast New York law firm and a terrific cook. Janice is wearing black sweat pants and a blue sweatshirt.

We slide into chairs at the kitchen table, eating and talking. Eyeing Lock’s stack of chocolate chip pancakes, I ask the “breakfast cook” for one plain one and soon it is on my plate swimming in maple syrup. 

 Jonce announces cheerfully, “OK. It’s a beautiful day and I need everybody outside in a half an hour. There’s work to do: bulbs to plant. And the tomatoes have to come out. They’re done. We’ll save the large green ones. Half an hour,” he reinforces. “Everyone ready!” 

I look up quickly to check the teenage reaction to their father’s plan. To my surprise there is none: not even eye rolling. They just go on eating.

 Wait a minute! Aren’t teenagers supposed to rebel against this sort of thing? “Everybody outside to work?” Shouldn’t that elicit at least a few groans? 

I concentrate on scraping up the last of the maple syrup off my plate. Then I remember that last spring when I was visiting the same thing had happened after Sunday breakfast. “Everyone outside!” That time we cleaned the terrace furniture, swept the terrace, and pulled dead leaves away from arising plants. No one baulked then either. My son: the “Pied Piper Coach.”

Soon it's: “Time to go! Everybody outside!” We collect in the mudroom, grabbing light jackets, replacing slippers with shoes and head out. 

Near the wooden gardening shed, Jonce has laid out a mix of tools: shovels, rakes, hole diggers for bulbs and a stack of gardening gloves.  

“Here Mom,” he says, “these should fit you.” He hands me some worn and dirty gloves.

Maggie and I rip out tomato plants in the little back garden, clearing the space for the daffodil bulbs that Jonce has given us. “Be sure to spread them out,” he yells over his shoulder as he departs for the garden in front where Janice is already planting tulips.

We plan where we want to dig the holes. Maggie places the hole digger firmly in the earth and jumps up and down on it. It barely sinks in. Maggie weighs ninety-two pounds. We begin to laugh. 

 “Can you jump any harder?” I challenge her through my laughter. 

“I’ll try!” 

Jonce comes from around the corner. “You try it, Mom.” I hesitate. At my age? Can I jump and land on those narrow spikes that stick out from the side of the metal cylinder? Seeing my hesitation, Jonce urges me on. “You can do it!” 

Of course I can do it. While Maggie steadies the long handle I climb on and jump up and down on the digger “Way to go, Mom!”Jonce shouts. But, in fact, I don’t do any better than my granddaughter.

By now Lock has joined us and he is laughing. Trying to make these holes has become ridiculous. “Let me do it,” Lock says, taking the handle from Maggie’s hand. I quickly step aside. Three jumps and that sucker is driven six inches straight into the ground. We all cheer. Our hero grins and nods his head to the applauding crowd.  

From then on Lock jumps while Maggie and I plant and cover, pushing back all the excavated dirt and smoothing the spot with the mulch and the remaining leaves scattered on the ground. We are a team.

I pat the leaves above the daffodil bulbs’ nests, speaking quietly. “Have a nice cozy winter down there.” I say. “I hope you are warm and safe beneath the snow. Then you can open up and do whatever it is you do to become a daffodil. See you in the spring.” 

My granddaughter is kneeling beside me on the ground and reaches out to pat the earth with me. No bright autumn morning was ever any better than this.

Not In My Stars

Last week’s blog didn’t capture enough interest to fill a jam jar. It was by far the least read blog since I began writing them in January. I’m not whining; I’m just observing.

It’s too hard!” a friend complained. “I don’t want to think about all that: whether there is an after life, all my preferences and prejudices. It’s too much.”

The fault, dear friends, is not in my stars, but in my writing. How to make the ideas of eternal life, evolving souls, liberation and self-awareness more lighthearted? More appealing? I just couldn’t get there, which lets you know what a novice I remain at this business of communicating through words.

There is a writer who can do this; one who can, through engaging story telling, skillfully balance between the light and the dark of this life with words so simple and beautiful and characters so complex and beguiling that I am awed.

You have heard of the book/movie, The Fault In Our Stars, by John Green. You must have. Even though Green writes Young Adult literature—the only growing segment of published writing in America these days----yes, young people are reading---those of us over fifty must be paying some attention to this aspect of our literary culture.

I have read The Fault In Our Stars and marveled that an author could write such a heart-twisting book with so much love, humor and grace. Then I read Looking For Alaska and was blown away by Green’s ability to create characters that, whatever our age, we can all recognize and feel compassion for. Alaska is also a sad story but one of redemption and hope as well. Green never seems to leave us without hope.

And if I had his skill as a writer I would have wound a story around you, my friends, with that last blog of mine as tightly as Green winds the story of adolescent “Pudge,” the protagonist in Looking for Alaska.

Pudge is a brilliant, friendless, nerdy guy who, wanting more for his life, goes off to boarding school in search of the “Great Perhaps.” At Culver Creek he finds friends who turn him inside out, friends whose life situations educate him far beyond the classes he takes.

At the end of Looking for Alaska, a solemn and pensive Pudge writes for his religion class final exam: “I believe now that we are greater than the sum of our parts. And that part has to go somewhere, because it cannot be destroyed.” “ . . . one thing I have learned from science classes is that energy is never created and never destroyed.”

“We cannot be born and we cannot die.” Pudge continues. “Like all energy, we can only change shapes and sizes and manifestations.” “ . . . that part of us greater than the sum of our parts cannot begin and cannot end . . .”

The above quotes are from Looking For Alaska by John Green. I cannot reference the page numbers, as I should, because I read this book on my Kindle. But what I can say is this: no matter precisely where in the book these thoughts are expressed, about the after life, John Green and I are on the same page. 

Wanting To Get Rid Of The "I" In Me

Saturday night after Buddhist teacher, Will Duncan’s, talk, I was awake for hours. I was wracked by the desire to somehow burn through my ego during the time remaining before I die. Burn through until there would be nothing left of it but ashes. How to get rid of the “I” in me?

Good grief! What was I thinking? In the light of day I know that isn’t going to happen. Surrendering the “I” is for the great souls like Jesus, and the Buddha and Muhammad and Martin Luther King and Gandhi and Nelson Mandela--just to name a few-- all of whom burned through ordinary life and its dazzling distractions to the place of ultimate service. That they might die for the teaching they offered the world was clear to each one. And some did have to make the final sacrifice; some did not. Nonetheless each one suffered his personal and profound trial in the process of purification.

I’ve had some trials; purified, I am not.

Have you noticed our propensity for killing off those who emerge to give voice to the still revolutionary messages of forgiveness, of our connection to all beings and of our call to love “our crooked neighbors as our crooked selves?”  (W.H. Auden)

Unlike the great souls, I am pretty well stuck into this life: this existence of mine, rife with its preferences, prejudices, its possibilities unexplored, jealousies and human frailties. You know what I mean: all the stuff that keeps us grinding away at life. Most of us are unable to sustain a vision that propels us forward into increased open heartedness; greater understanding and generosity and above all, the freedom to just let go.

Because I believe in reincarnation—please do not ask me to explain this-- I want to clear as much of the debris of my ego stuff in this lifetime as I am able to identify. My hope is that in the next life—in which of course I will not be me--I will not have to repeat all the same garbage. There will be new garbage to deal with as my soul evolves; I just don’t want the same old, same old, been there, done that.

You know that feeling? I’ve been through this situation before: the people are different, the stage set is altered, but I am feeling a familiar nasty anxiety here. I thought I had this one figured out!

If we can shine a benevolent light of awareness on such moments as they arise, we can, right then, in that moment, have a chance to make a different choice. We have the capacity to change when we notice our habitual patterns.

God knows I am a million lifetimes away from being able, like Will Duncan, to spend three years gently guiding rattlesnakes out of my solitary hut in the desert. But I can be on the path of liberation. I can keep opening my heart. Every time I want to shut down on someone or some situation I can become aware of that and breathe and soften my heart around it. I can seek a different response to feeling attacked, or ignored or disappointed or angry or . . . anything.

As Will would say, “We can only do the best that we can” in each moment, trying not to concretize our opinions, solidify our prejudices, juice our dramas and stir our anger. When we notice those habitual reactions arising, we can choose to breathe and soften. We can choose freedom; we can choose peace.

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Check out Unleash Potential, offering personal growth groups in Fairfield every third Thursday. Caroline J. Temple and Lisa Jacoby are the compassionate leaders of Unleash Potential and my companions on this journey of reflection and self-discovery. Call Caroline: 203 866 9331 for the details of the workshops. Click here for general information:

http://www.unleashpotential.us/events/