Am I Living Small?

Recently I was invited to serve on a certain board of directors in Fairfield. I almost fell off my chair. Not in my wildest dreams would it have occurred to me that I might be considered for this board. I have done some public speaking over the last year for this group; I do feel quite passionate about the direction this organization is taking. But a board member?

My first thoughts were: Are they mad? Why would they want someone who is eighty-one to serve on what is a vibrant, important board, consisting mostly of members younger than my children? This can’t be happening!

“You don’t have to decide now,” I was told gently. “Just tell me that you are even willing to consider it.”

Stunned, I nodded my head. “Of course, I will consider it. I am so honored to be asked.”

But, at the same time, in my head I could hear the following sentences: You are too old. Your board-serving days are long over. (There was a time when I served on boards.) As a single senior you are supposed to be learning to play bridge and thinking about retirement communities. This is not for you. You will fall asleep at the evening meetings.

I came home dazed but determined to think about it. This was an amazing opportunity, I knew. What would this mean for my life?

 I plunked myself down at my computer where I am accustomed to thinking, and there, lying beside my Mac, were pieces of yellow, lined paper containing quotes from a recent sermon delivered by the empowering pastor, Joel Osteen.

 On top was a single piece of paper, which read: “I wouldn’t be alive unless there was something greater in my future.”

The other bits were my notes from Osteen’s recent talk about “living small.”

Was that it? Was I “living small?”  Was I afraid to live a wide-open, spacious life? “Limited thinking leads to living in a small way,” Osteen tells us. “Don’t get stuck and stay there.”  Whatever our age, whatever our situation in life we are to dream new dreams and seek new horizons, he admonishes us. We are to “live large!”

 According to Osteen, “God”—the Universe--whatever works for you—“wants to enlarge us, wants us to gain new ground, and we have to make room for that new ground in our thinking.”

The idea here is not to compulsively bite off more than we can chew, but simply to remain open to expansion, to new possibilities in our lives.

Was I stuck? No longer able to think of living a larger life? Was I caught in some age-determined stereotype that had snuck up on me like a creepy, red rash whose itch held me fast?

Living in a “small environment,” Osteen tells us, gets inside of us and begins to control how we think about ourselves. We need to combat this diminishment and instead, encourage ourselves, be willing to seize the next opportunity and be unafraid to spread our wings no matter how frazzled those feathers appear to us. We are called to live an “overcoming and expanded life.”

 There are no accidents. The notes beside my computer, hastily scrawled one Sunday a couple of weeks ago while Osteen was speaking, made my decision for me.

I opened my email, typed in the address, and sent: “YES!”

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Check out www.whatIknowtobetrue.com offering personal growth groups in Fairfield every third Thursday. Caroline J. Temple and Lisa Jacoby are the compassionate leaders of What I Know To Be True and my companions on this journey of reflection and self-discovery. Call Caroline: 203 866 9331for the details of the workshops. Click here for general information:

 www.whatiknowtobetrue.com.

More Than A Glimpse

In 1987 I read a book called The Shell Seekers. The book was set in a village in Cornwall, England, called St. Mawes. I fell in love with the description of the village and decided to visit for the month of August. St Mawes was even more beautiful than I had imagined and not only that, I was welcomed. I spent twenty-seven summers in St. Mawes, renting a cottage for ten of those summers and then buying a tiny, uphill cottage overlooking the harbor. 

                                                    

Seated at a rickety wooden table on an equally rickety wooden chair, the window to my right in my small office overlooking the boat-filled harbor, I wrote stories about life in St Mawes. This is one of them.

More Than A Glimpse 

Besides a hooded Gortex jacket, one of the best things I own for my summers in Cornwall is my bus pass. This plastic card with my photo on it not only allows me to travel from village to village on the Roseland Peninsula for free, but also offers me a glimpse into local life that I treasure.

Recently I took the bus to Truro, the nearest large town, the county seat, in fact. The trip takes an hour, making four scheduled stops. Unscheduled stops also occur in order to pick up someone, anyone, standing beside the road in front of a farm and waving the bus down. This spontaneity is bewildering to a punctual, schedule-minded American, but it is easy to see that it is a practice well accepted by both the bus drivers and the local passengers. Everyone knows everyone on the bus: the atmosphere is friendly and cheerful.

The bus trip to Turo through the Cornish lanes is not for the faint-hearted. The bus hurtles through the lanes, swerving madly along curving roads so narrow that when a car is coming the other way, more often than not, the car driver has to nose the car into a hedgerow on the other side and stop. The bus is absolutely the alpha vehicle on the road, something, I think, that may be secretly empowering to the mostly senior citizens who are hanging onto the grab bars in front of their seats.

On this particular trip, the bus stopped at Tregony and a nice-looking, eighty-something woman boarded. She settled herself into a seat diagonally in front of me so I had an uninterrupted view of her. Her eyes were slightly puffy, but a clear blue. She was wearing pink lipstick and her still-thick, grey hair was curly and cut short. Neatly dressed in a blue skirt, comfortable beige shoes and pale stockings, I imagined the inevitable cardigan and blouse, beneath her tan mid-length raincoat. Round, filigreed gold earrings sparkled on her ears.

Just before we got to Tresillian—a scheduled stop—the woman stood up, smoothed her skirt and walked carefully, but with confidence, toward the front of the bus where she stood, holding the rail and waiting for the bus to stop. I thought she was planning to disembark. But no.

At the bus stop I could see out of my window a tweed-capped man, also in his eighties, his right arm fully extended to command the bus to stop. He was wearing brown trousers, a blue shirt, and a red tie beneath an open light tan rain jacket. With the hand that was not waving at the bus, he supported himself with a walking stick.

The waiting woman stepped back from the door as the man slowly but steadily mounted the steps into the bus. He had a fleshy, rather pink face, which lit up when her saw her.

Smiling, she led him to her seat. She slid in toward the window and then, turning, but not moving to assist him, she watched as he organized himself and his stick.

I could see only the back of his head, the sparse white hair curling below his checked cap. It was her face that I watched.

They began to softly chat, their heads leaning toward each other, her affection for him apparent in the glow of her eyes, in the upturn of her mouth and the lift of her brow. In just a few moments, they were so absorbed with one another that they seemed cocooned, completely insulated, oblivious to the rest of the passengers and the breath-taking machinations of the bus.

Where were they going on their day out in Truro, I wondered, these two octogenarians with their mutual affection?  To lunch and the afternoon cinema? To Marks and Spencers to buy food treats and maybe a new sweater?

Perhaps I was rude to have observed them so intently. More than a glimpse this was, to be sure, but I was so grateful and felt such joy to have witnessed this gentle love blooming as brightly and unexpectedly as the bravest yellow wild flower reaching toward the sun from between the stones of the hedgerows: This late-season love, fully thriving amidst the rattling, lurching of the bus through the winding lanes to Truro. It was irresistible.

What Is It With Me and The Feds?

If you go to the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) in New Haven and they hold off your clearance, because, they say, your fingerprint pictures were, “not clear enough” and therefore the FBI must do a “background check,” it’s annoying, but not particularly disturbing.

I said to the woman on the phone, who gave me this information,  “But I am eighty years old and I don’t have any background.”

This is not strictly true. During my civil rights activist years in the 1970s, I, and a few friends, raised some money to buy a printing machine for the Toledo, Ohio chapter of the Black Panthers—there were eight of them and I knew them all. Some months later, the FBI sent two “Suits” to the First National Bank to question my husband about his wife’s “association” with the Panthers.

He was pretty mad when he came home. Me? I was furious.  Wait a minute! The FBI called on you about me? They didn’t come to me directly?  If they want to know about me, they can ask me!

Ah. Those were the days. But if we ask Senator Tom Cotton, Republican from Arkansas, the days haven’t changed all that much. “Men are simple creatures,” Cotton is quoted as saying. “It doesn’t take much to please us. The problem is women.” I think my former husband would have agreed with the senator.

My national TSA clearance hanging in abeyance, my next stop is at JFK with my daughter, who has already achieved Global Entry clearance and knows the ropes. I have filled out all the necessary data online and, armed with appropriate ID etc., I’m ready for my 9:00 AM appointment before we catch a plane to California.

 I am invited into the agent’s office by myself and everything goes smoothly until the very nice woman asks me to put my hands on the glass plate for the fingerprinting, which I do.

She looks puzzled and presses my hand down with hers. A couple of picture failures later, she gives me some white cream and instructs me to rub it thoroughly over all of my fingertips. I have on too much hand lotion? Something is clearly amiss.

We try again. No luck. “What is going on?” I ask. She smiles and rises, “I am going to get your daughter.”

My daughter? Why? I study my fingers.

She comes back with Taylor and explains to her, as if I were not sitting there, that I do not have photographable prints.  Therefore, although I will be given international clearance, when I am re-entering the country, and I slide my passport into the Trusted Traveler slot, I will receive a slip of paper with my info covered by a big black X. This, she tells Taylor, I must hand to the TSA agent nearby and then he will do something with that and I will be cleared. She then shows Taylor a sample X-marked paper.

“I don’t have fingerprints? Everyone has fingerprints,” I say. I am still incredulous.

“It happens.” She shrugs.

I do not like the look of the sample paper with the thick, black X crisscrossing it and I am beginning to wonder why she is telling my daughter all this since I am the one with the no fingerprint problem. It appears that not only do I not have visible fingerprints, but that I am invisible in other ways as well.

 What is it with federal agents? Once it was the infuriating uncontrollable-radical-wife-thing and now it’s the insulting blurred-out-incompetent-old-lady thing?

Something in me twitches and I can’t help myself. Holding out my hands, palms up, I say with a smile, “I had my fingerprints rubbed out when I was an international spy."

Whoops! Taylor kicks my leg under the table and the woman’s face freezes. I, however, am really laughing.

Stepping Outside Of The Lines

 It's Wednesday, March 5, and I need to write about how the ceiling in my condo is leaking and I was told there was nothing to be done about it. Too dangerous to get onto the roof above and remove the snow. I was told to “be patient.”  Standing there watching the drips plop into my roasting pan I found patience hard to come by.

I want to write that the roof above my condo was “redone” only last year. How well I remember the hammering and the clomping of feet. Redone? How exactly? The flashing that was supposed to drive ice off the edge—or something like that--apparently didn’t flash sufficiently because the pile up of snow and ice on this high roof is visible from the street.

I want to write that friends of mine moved the couch I could not budge, away from under the fissure that now runs across the entire ceiling of my TV/library room. I am so grateful!

I want you to know that after placing yet another roasting pan under the new drips at 2:00 this morning, I resolved to call the contractor who did my renovation when I moved in some years ago. As always, he called right back—God bless him—and told me that it was a difficult, not very well designed, high roof and that most roofers were busy fixing everyone’s else’s roofs, but that he would take a look and make a few calls.

Later in the day, a friend gave me her contractor/roofer’s name and I put a call into him. Not heard back yet. I’m carrying my cell everywhere with me just in case.

I informed the management of my condominium association of my moves to solve the problem.  That did not go down well. I have stepped outside of the lines. For insurance reasons, I was told, I am not allowed to independently hire anyone to work on the outside of the building. Never mind that the association had no person of their own to offer.

Where is the success in this story? The leaks continue but at least everyone is awake. Trained well by Bridgehampton contractor and good friend, the late Rock Hildreth, that the “squeaky wheel gets the oil,” I have been a rabble-rousing, giant pain in the ass. And a couple of hours ago I heard from the unfailingly nice super here, that maybe, just maybe, they have found someone who will dare to go up on this roof. It turns out that there are nine condos at the moment with leaky parts.

Meanwhile, I am instructed by management to “contain” the water as best as I can. Does that mean get better containers? More buckets? What?

Oh ho! The ding-dong of the doorbell just interrupted this writing and the condo super brought in and introduced me to a strapping, rugged-looking man, who tomorrow morning will take the snow off my roof. Saved!

May all the rest of you with leaking roofs resulting from this snow laden, ice frozen, non-stop winter, be "squeaky wheels" and equally fortunate.

                                                      

                                             

Are We Listening?

A good listener is hard to find, as rare as a rainbow in summer and equally wondrous.

I remember that my mother was a great talker, funny and smart, a terrific storyteller, but a poor listener. She thought it was a waste of time to listen, I guess, because she once confided in me, “Frankly, dear, I’m more interesting than most people.”

 Rarely listening to others, how did she know?

My much-older cousin, Mary, on the other hand, was a great listener.  My brother and I used to talk about how, when we saw Mary at family gatherings, she would ask the usual questions about school, our studies, and our friends, but what was different was she paid attention to our responses. Even more astounding, she would follow up with another question and behold! An actual teenage-adult conversationwould begin.

Psychotherapists and ministers listen. But they are trained and paid to—especially psychotherapists. Nonetheless I’ve seen psychotherapists and ministers, who were supposed to be listening, but, overworked and fatigued, their eyeballs have grown glassy, slipping upwards like a three year-old resisting a much-needed nap. A great time for the patient or parishioner to say something like, “That was around the time when I kicked my pet rabbit in the stomach” Wakes everybody right up!

Have you noticed how married couples either listen to each other or don’t? The patterns are amazing. Wives cut their husbands off mid-story or just when he is beginning to offer an opinion. The husband then assumes a vaguely attentive look as his wife carries forward whatever subject he had begun. In all likelihood the pattern is so ingrained that she doesn’t even notice how she has eclipsed him.

In some couples the reverse is true. The husband slashes through whatever his wife is saying and she retreats. How diminishing this is to the partner, who rather than make a scene, surrenders repeatedly?

       What’s my advice to the mostly silent partner? Choose the moment and let your partner know how being interrupted makes you feel.

My women’s study group had a discussion about our own listening capabilities. True confessions, more like. One woman offered: “I get impatient. I just can’t stand it so I finish my husband’s sentences for him. I know I shouldn’t and I try not to, but . . .” She shrugged her shoulders.

Another woman stated with a gleam in her eyes, “I’ve always been the talker in our marriage, the quick-minded, smarter, better-informed one. At least I’ve always thought so.” We all laughed.

She went on to tell us that since her illness with cancer, she has come to depend on her husband more and has discovered, that he, though paced more slowly and gently, is wonderfully intelligent and capable.

In my married life, before I learned something about listening, my opinions were unceasing and forceful. I can still see my former husband inching his chair back and away from mine as slowly and cautiously as one might retreat from a hissing snake.

It’s a helpful image for me to carry. If I am talking that much, I most certainly am not listening.

If we are honest with ourselves, often, while we are listening, we are busily planning our witty and clever responses.

We need to do better in giving our attention. Not only do we need to listen well, we need to attend to meaning and not just skim the surface of the words being said.

None of us is infinitely interesting, not even to ourselves. We’ve heard many of the stories of our long-time partners and friends more times than we can count and they have heard ours. It can be a challenge to remain attentive.

But we must and this is why. A person who feels sincerely listened to feels repected and valued. It’s as simple as that. And that’s how we want those we care about to feel, isn’t it?

***

Check out www.whatIknowtobetrue.com offering personal growth groups in Fairfield every third Thursday. Caroline J. Temple and Lisa Jacoby are the compassionate leaders of What I Know To Be True and my companions on this journey of reflection and self-discovery. Call Caroline: 203 866 9331for the details of the workshops. Click here for general information:

www.whatiknowtobetrue.com.

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Welcome back Ukrainian readers! I have missed you and been worried. We pray for peace in your country.