Saturday, May 17, 2014

If Parenting Is Like Gardening, I'm Screwed

A few weeks ago, we bought some outdoor plants to begin our spring planting—it’s mostly decorative, although I do have herbs on the back deck.

I always say that I’d like a vegetable garden, but the truth is that I don’t think I would make a very good gardener. I’ve gotten better at keeping the plants from dying, but when we first moved in together and started planting green things in the ground and in pots, I needed frequent reminders about watering them during the day. I still need reminders, but not as frequently, and mostly, what we plant does fine, and it’s very satisfying to see those little green things growing and flowering.

Indoor plants, sadly, are another story. You would think it would be easier to remember to water those, since, you know, they live in the house with me, but no. Not even a terrarium, which is supposed to water and sustain itself, survived under my care. We had this hardy little rubber plant, though, that did survive for a long time, trooper that it was.

But a week or two ago, I had a glass of water that been on my nightstand overnight, and I thought, hey, I should water the plant with this! And I went over to the back door where the plant lived, and it was gone. That is how much I had neglected the poor thing—it just disappeared without my noticing it at all. I asked my husband about it, and he said he had tossed it on the compost pile weeks ago.

Alas, poor rubber plant, we barely knew you.

Our butterfly plant. 
It makes me really happy, though, when I manage not to kill them off. We haven’t planted our impatiens yet
this year, but we usually have a bed of them next to the sidewalk, and they’re such cheerful little flowers. There’s a perennial butterfly plant in a pot out front, too, and I love seeing it return every spring, with its purple leaves and delicate white flowers.

None of these would have survived if it had been up to me, but I’m glad I married someone who wasn’t scared to plant just because his wife had a black thumb.

I’ve heard lots of analogies over the years about how parenting is like gardening, and while I can understand the analogy on an academic level, I’m glad it’s not the case that being bad at one means you’ll be bad at the other. When I was pregnant with my son, apparently I was afraid that it did mean that, because I had a dream during my pregnancy that my baby was born, and I left him in a windowsill and forgot to feed him. It didn’t take a lot of dream analysis to figure that one out!

So as much as I tend to disregard those gardening/parenting analogies, I surprised myself by having something of a parenting epiphany the other day while looking at the plants we bought for the planter boxes on the front porch.

They’re some kind of lilies—I don’t know. I tossed out the little card that was in the tray of plants once I got the little guys tucked into their beds, but the picture showed that there would eventually be flowers on these cute little plants that really looked like we had stuck pineapples in the ground and buried them up to their necks. No sign of flowers or buds or anything at all. But awfully cute little plants.

Several weeks have passed now, and the plants have gotten taller. Basically the same as when we got them, but
elongated. Gangly, like teenagers. When the tiniest buds started to appear in the tops of these tall, gangly teenage plants, I thought, oh, goody! We’ll have flowers soon!

But now those buds have just gotten bigger and they are just tantalizing me. It seems like it’s been a week that they’ve looked like any day now they’ll be flowers, but no. The buds stay stubbornly closed, even though to me they look like surely they’re ready to open up.

As I was looking at the buds yesterday, willing them to open, it occurred to me just how much those gangly plants are like my boy. A cute little thing when I brought him home, there was only the vaguest suggestion, based on his anatomy, that he would one day be a man. And he’s grown the same way these plants have grown—mostly just up. As with the outdoor plants, too, there have been influences other than me that have shaped him and aided in his growth.

I’ve enjoyed all of the stages of his growing-up years and noted with satisfaction when the first signs started showing that, indeed, he was going to turn into a grown man one day.

Now he’s 20, and it seems like, really, those buds of adulthood should be opening faster than they are. Now that adulthood is so close, it feels like it’s never going to happen. I keep watching for it, encouraging, doing what I can, but there is no forcing that bud to open. I know, though, that just like that bud will open into a flower, my boy will  be a man.

But whereas I had a picture of the plant to show me how it would turn out, I don’t really have anything like that for my boy. He has always been his own person, doing things at his own pace and in his own way, and he’ll be his own man, too.


And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom. 




Wednesday, March 19, 2014

Make New Friends, But Keep the Old

On St. Patrick’s Day, I saw a bunch of Irish quotes going around, and one that particularly struck me said, “A good friend is like a four leaf clover: Hard to find and lucky to have.”

The reason it struck me is that I don’t think it’s true. I think it should be the other way around: lucky to find and hard to have and keep. Well, when I say hard to keep, I mean it doesn’t just happen—there is work involved to keep a friendship going for 10, 20, 30 years or more.

I have four friends from high school—A, B, R, and S—who illustrate this perfectly. Any description of our friendship will inevitably sound like the back cover copy of a chick lit book, but I’ll try anyway.

I’ve known B the longest, since we were in middle school together before we both ended up at the same small boarding school. A was my first roommate, and we were so different in so many ways that we joked that we were Ernie and Bert—I was the messy, carefree Ernie, and she was Bert. S found me on the first day we moved into our dorm rooms—she was wandering down the hall, wondering out loud to anyone who might be listening why there were so few electrical outlets in our rooms. And R was just one of those people who drew you in—you wanted to be her friend, felt lucky to be counted among those she called friends.

Among the five of us, we covered quite a spectrum: B was the athletic one (and also the smart one); A was the serious, forthright, straight-laced one (another smart one); S was the loud, funny one; and R was the popular one. And I’m the narrator, so I can avoid labeling myself. But since this was the group I fell in with, I can’t say that these good friends were hard to find. We just found each other, and it was lucky we did.

Keeping them, though—that hasn't been luck. That’s taken some effort over the last (ahem) 30-something years, as we’ve all had life happen to us in a variety of ways and we’re scattered all over the country. 

The gang’s all here, plus a couple of extras—but this was us in high school.

S, although she lives the farthest away, has in many ways been the easiest. We did lose touch for a few years after high school, but got back in touch when my son and her oldest were babies, and the closeness came right back and never left. These days if we don’t talk (or at least chat on Facebook) every day, things feel a little off. We talked through the darkest days of my divorce as well as the darkest days of her cancer treatment, and we talk about plenty else that’s not anywhere near as heavy as that. She’s still the loud, funny one, and so much more. She’s also my sounding board, my reality check. Although A, B, and R were in my first wedding, only S was in my second.

A lives out west now, and sadly, she has health issues that keep her from traveling very much. She did come out for B’s wedding seven years ago, but she won’t be at our high school reunion this fall. The thing I love about A is that she is so very pragmatic that sending an e-mail to make a date to talk on the phone next Tuesday at 3:00 is completely normal, and so that’s what we do. But last week she called me because she had fallen down on the floor with a terribly painful back spasm, and after making sure her 10-year-old could get to school by himself, she asked him if he would bring her pain meds, a glass of water, and her phone before he left, and she called me to pass the time until she could get up. Did I mention she’s incredibly pragmatic? We don’t do it often enough, but we make the phone dates, since that’s the only way to stay in touch. 

R is down at the beach, and although it’s been a few years now since we’ve seen each other, for a long time her home was the place I went when I needed a break from life—she was my refuge from the storm. I thought it might change once she got married, but her husband has welcomed me many times too—sometimes it’s just been me, and sometimes I’ve had my boy with me. One time, before I was coming, she was going through a stressful time, and her husband asked if she really felt up to company. “Company?” she said to him. “Sharon isn’t company. She'll probably end up cooking for us.” There have been times I’ve felt like maybe my friendship with R might just fade away—I’ve changed so much that I know it’s hard for her to keep me as a friend. But we talked about it and decided that, despite our differences now, there’s too much history and our friendship is too important to just let it die. 

B was single for a long time—into her 40s—and she and I were probably the closest in the last years of my first marriage. She does have a lot of natural talent, but one of the things that makes B such a strong athlete and student is that she is tenacious, and she’s a fighter. And she can be rather intense. It felt good having her in my corner when things were hard for me, and it gave me strength knowing that someone with that much fight in her had my back. So that’s why it hurt more than I can say when she decided she needed a break from me several years back and cut me off. It was like a break-up, and a painful one. Her first gesture towards a reconciliation was an invitation to her wedding, and we’ve been building our friendship back ever since. It’s been work—certainly not luck—that’s kept us going, and I’m very glad we’re still going.



There are some people who have a knack for finding four leaf clovers—my dad and my sister both have it, but even if my sister points out a single square foot of grass and tells me there’s one there, I can never see it. I did not inherit the knack for seeing them, but I do have ones they’ve found tucked away in various books in my house.

I do, though, have a knack for finding those people who are going to be lifelong friends, and not just these four. I kind of collect them and hold onto them like a friend hoarder. I’m just not willing to give them up when I’ve found them, because they are precious and rare, like the four leaf clovers. Lucky to find, and worth the effort to keep. 


Sunday, March 9, 2014

My Weekend Trip to Atlanta

Most of my work days are spent here at my desk at home, copy editing scholarly books, usually on topics of education. It's interesting work, and there are definite pluses to being able to do it from home.

Then, once or twice a month, I get to write an article for a web site promoting good things happening here in the Upstate of South Carolina--a little bit of spending money for some pretty interesting work, learning about what's going on around me.

But hands down, the most rewarding work I do all year--if "work" can even describe something that brings so much personal satisfaction--is heading up Great Kids Deserve Great Books, the annual children's book drive of Hub City Writers Project in Spartanburg, now in its 4th year.

Great Kids Deserve Great Books collects books to give to each student in high-poverty schools here in Spartanburg, and nothing could be closer to my heart than that.

The first two years I lived here, I was involved only in the sorting of books and distribution at one of the schools. Having worked in two different children's book mail order businesses, I had a good handle on the sorting part, determining the proper age range for each book, making sure there was a good mix of boy/girl, fiction/nonfiction, advanced reader/emerging reader, and so on. But with mail order, you never get to actually see a kid pick up a book and get excited about it.

So going to that school and being with the kids when they picked out their books--well, I was in smitten. In love. Besotted. Not only were these kids picking out their books, but they were being given the books to take home, and some of these kids may have never owned a book before. I wanted to do it again.

Last year, I was asked to head up the drive, and in addition to the bin collections we had done the previous two years, we were given a donation from the Rotary Club, and with that, I went down to Atlanta to GABBS, the spring remainder and overstock sale, and bought nearly 1,000 books. I was familiar with this sale because I used to go there and buy books to sell in catalogs, thinking about sales projections and profit margin and catalog slots. But this time all I was thinking about was getting as many books as I possibly could for the money I had available.

I loved being able to get so many new books to mix in with the donated used books, and once again I got to go to one of the schools while the kids picked out their books. You may have to know me well to understand how close to heaven that was, being able to buy books and give them all away to kids. To be there with kids as they looked over the books to make their choices. One child tearfully came up to me and asked if there was another Sponge Bob book, because other kids had snatched up the two or three on the table, and I was able to find a different book to make her happy, which very nearly made my own heart explode with happiness. Another  boy came and asked me if I had any snake books, and once more, the answer was no, but we were able to find something he liked. Another satisfied customer.

This year, we got twice as much money donated, this time from Advance America, and again, this past weekend, I went to Atlanta to buy books. I had to use that money to cover the expenses of my trip as well as buying books, so I had to be as frugal as I could be--and not shy about asking the vendors to work with me since I wasn't reselling their books but giving them away.

One of the vendors donated the shipping costs so that I could just spend my money on books. Another took a percentage off of the total to offset the shipping. Yet another gave me her rock bottom prices on the books I was buying (and this is a business with thin margins to begin with) because shipping was out of her control. I'm still waiting to hear from the last vendor, because she was checking with the owner to see how they could help.

There are a lot of things I have loved doing professionally over the years, but I can't think of anything that has given me so much sheer joy as these trips to Atlanta for this show. Back when I was buying books for resale, I loved the book shows, and the remainder shows in particular. Row upon row of books--but more than that, books on sale. For cheap. It doesn't get much better than that for a frugal book lover! And I could, and did, wheel and deal. But as much as I loved it then, doing my best to drive up our margins and down our cost of goods, there is nothing quite so rewarding as buying books that you get to give away to kids.

In a few weeks, the boxes of books will begin to arrive, which will pretty much be like Christmas for me. Then the process of sorting and boxing these books, as well as other donated books we collect, to distribute to our schools. I ended up being able to buy over 1700 books in all. I found not one, but two books about snakes, and I hope the snake boy will be back and find one of them. I have dreams of him growing up to be a preeminent reptile scientist, but even if he doesn't, I'll be happy to send him home with a couple of books to call his own.

These kids in these schools may not have been dealt the best hand in life, but they really are great kids. And great kids do, truly, deserve great books.

Sunday, March 2, 2014

On the Occasion of My Dad's Retirement



Dad on his 88th birthday
On Friday night, my parents and sister came to our house for dinner. I meant to have a cake or something special for my dad, because it was his last day of work, but somehow dessert never ends up factoring into my meal planning. I'm not sure he really felt like celebrating it, though.

The truth is, I can't quite imagine my dad not working--and not because he's a workaholic, or because his identity is tied up in what he does for a living, but just because he likes to stay occupied and he likes having a place to go and seeing new people.

Nine years ago, we had a retirement/birthday party for him, but right before the party, he decided that instead of retiring, he would just cut back to part time instead of retiring. He was 80 then, and I think he was hoping to keep working until his birthday this year, when he will be 90. So if anyone deserves to kick back and take it easy, it's my dad.


Dad with my grandpa, circa 1945
I don't know what Dad's hopes and ambitions were for his life when he was a young man, but probably he assumed he would keep farming the land that he and his father had been farming--and he was doing just that when he met a young nursing student at a church singles' group. They married soon after she graduated, and he was past 40 when three children came along.

I've often wished I could know what went on in the conversations that took place in which my dad was convinced to leave Indiana, the only home he had ever known, and go out west, with no particular town in mind, with the object of finding someplace they liked where there was a motel for sale. I have my ideas of how that went, but even if I were to ask them now, I don't know if I would find out the whole story. But in any case, we ended up in Durango, Colorado, the owners of the Alpine North Motel on Main Street. And then we ended up in Peru for a couple of years, where my parents were sort of "temp missionaries." When we came back to Durango, we didn't have the motel anymore, but there were two mini storage businesses.

And then, in 1978, we moved again, this time to Asheville, NC, where my parents still live. They were small business owners again for a little while, but it wasn't a good fit and didn't really work out, so my dad went out and got a job.

When I was 12 and he was 54, he started working as a locksmith at Alan Shaw Company. I remember him bringing home the cylinders and pins and showing me how to put different sized pins in a cylinder lock and how a key is cut to match the pins so that it will open the lock. For 35 years, he's been keying locks and installing them, working on projects big and small, in people's homes and in schools and hospitals.

It may not sound like a very exciting job, but one of the beautiful things about my dad is that he always found something interesting about his work day--someone he had spoken to, or a new route he had discovered while driving to a site, or the particulars of the job itself. When my son and I lived with my parents for a while after my divorce, we all ate dinner together in the evening, and he always had a story about his work day.

Dad with my son, planting his small garden patch
It is rare, going out in public with my dad, that someone doesn't come up and speak to him--and often it's someone he's met on a job site. These days, he's more likely than he used to be not to remember who the person is, but they never know it, because he greets them all in the same friendly way. But these are the people he would talk about at dinner--the janitor whose wife was battling cancer, the contractor who knew a guy Dad went to high school with.

A book could be written about the lessons to be learned from a guy like my dad, but I think the thing I admire the most about him is his absolute contentment. A couple of weeks ago I got a fortune cookie that said, "Discontent is the first step in the progress of a man or a nation." I understand the truth of that in terms of the big picture, but in terms of daily living, my dad's quiet contentment with his lot in life is, I think, the way to really live.








Thursday, February 20, 2014

In Which I Ponder Why I Love America

America Fever never runs quite so high as it does during the Olympics, I think. For a couple of weeks we're all cheering for the same team--Team USA--and the things that divide us the rest of the time seem to fall away just a little bit.

One of my favorite things about Team USA, though, is that sometimes you can't tell by the names (the last names, anyway) that they're American, because there's really no such thing as an "American" name in the sense that there are German names or Japanese names or Russian names. In figure skating alone, we've seen names like Yamaguchi, Lipinski, Boitano, and this year Shnapir and Castelli in the pairs competition.

Here are some of the reasons I love America:

I love that Simon Shnapir's father, a Russian Jew who with his wife immigrated to the U.S. when Simon was a toddler, has been making himself a very visible fan of Team USA in his big Uncle Sam hat.

I love the Coke ad with America the Beautiful in different languages, and I can't understand being offended by people from a variety of cultures thinking that America is beautiful. Shouldn't that make us proud, that people from all over the world want to make America their home?

I love that one of the men involved in the rescue of art plundered by the Nazis was German-born Harry Ettlinger, and in English that's still German-accented after all these years, he speaks of himself as an American, with obvious pride and undeniable patriotism.

I love that going out to dinner with my husband's cousins Anna and Beth and their families is like a League of Nations. Anna and her Venezuelan-born husband Jorge have four adopted daughters from Ethiopia, and Beth, whose husband Sam is from Japan, has two children (well, a teenager and a young adult) who are a perfect combination of Myers and Yamamuro, and bilingual to boot.

I love that Brandon Stanton, of Humans of New York, regularly captures moving stories of New Yorkers from all over the world who have come here for a better life--but certainly a favorite was Gac Filipaj, a refugee from the former Yugoslavia who worked as a janitor at Columbia University and went to school on his off hours for 12 years to earn a degree from the university that employed him.

****

A few years ago, my son and I spent a wonderful afternoon at the Ellis Island Museum, and we couldn't help but be struck by the courage and optimism of the people who got on boats with a dream of a better life--many times with little money and a pretty tenuous grasp on the English language. In fact, my son's great-grandfather came through Ellis Island with his brother and his mother, who had been abandoned by the boys' father just before the ship set sail. 

America was not always kind to the tired, poor, huddled masses yearning to breathe free--but the fabric of our country is woven through with the stories of religious pilgrims, slaves, refugees, and immigrants from all over the world, in addition to the Native Americans who were already here. 

I heard someone say once that America isn't really like a melting pot, which implies that everything melts together to become the same thing, but it's more like a big salad with lots of different ingredients that are separate and together are delicious. Where that analogy breaks down--or maybe where it's more honest than I'm entirely comfortable with--is when you think about the fact that there really are ingredients that some people put in a salad that you don't care much for.

My sister-in-law makes this wonderful spinach salad with candied walnuts and oranges and craisins (dried cranberries)--and I'll admit I pick around the craisins because I don't really like them. If one ends up on my fork, I'll eat it, but I would prefer not to. Same with that big salad that comes with your meal at Olive Garden--if an olive ends up on my plate, I will generally give it to my husband, because olives are one thing I just don't eat if I can help it.

But the thing is, there's a difference between not really liking craisins or olives and complaining that they shouldn't be there. Even as I'm picking them out, I realize that the issue is with me, not the salad or the individual ingredients.

I love this big salad that is America. With all its faults, it really is a wonderful country, with beautiful and amazingly diverse people.


"America, America, God shed his grace on thee
and crown thy good
with brotherhood
from sea to shining sea."








Wednesday, February 5, 2014

Guest Post: Sophie's Choice

For the past 20 years, being a mother has defined me and shaped me more than anything else. Nearly everything I do is filtered through that lens. But I am the mother of one boy, and as such, there are aspects of parenting that I will never experience--being the mother of a girl, for one, but also that inexplicable math of loving another child just as much as the one you already have without the first love being diminished.

After reading my friend Laura's explanation of how it works, though, I have a better understanding of how it is to love several children equally but also, occasionally, have favorites.

Sophie's Choice

by Laura Hankins Rand


I have four children. Or rather, I have four adults. The youngest is edging towards 30. I have been asked a few times over the years by an occasional rogue acquaintance if I have a favorite. I always respond with a resounding YES. I love seeing the surprised face and the wicked interest in such an unexpected and ill-advised response. We are supposed to love all our children equally, at all times, in all circumstances, world without end, amen, praise to the father, son, and Holy Ghost.

But I submit that every parent has a favorite. Oh yes, I believe this. Let me explain. When my second child was born, my oldest was 5. She was the center of the world. She defined everything a child should and could be. Her father once said, “I know I will love this new baby. But I also know that I can never love another child as much as I love this one.” Oh, the things we think we know until we experience them. I told him that love isn’t something we parcel out. Love is limitless. We would love the new baby with every bit of intensity that we loved the first.

I was right. And we went on to have four children, two girls, two boys. After the second girl, he admitted defeat and confessed that he loved her as much as he loved our singular first. Then we had our third – a boy. His father admitted to me (was he slightly ashamed?) that he had never felt this way before. It wasn’t that he loved this boy more than our girls. He just loved him differently. And when we had the second boy – the same. He was our last. We knew this. He was special for many reasons, not the least being he was last. The special position that somehow parents with multiple children understand.

Now our house was full – four busy children. Two exhausted parents. We never thought about degrees of love. How could we – we never had a spare moment. But looking back over the years as they and we have aged, I see more clearly the scope and breadth of parental love, the bursts, the pulsating underlying foundation of it all.

This week, one of my children had emergency surgery. He is now asleep in our guest room, recovering well. He is my favorite.

In 2006, I became a grandmother for the first time, by my second daughter – the one I knew somehow I could love as much as my first. I helped coach her through her delivery and saw her baby before she did – from the vantage point of the end of the hospital bed. That day, as she breathed and sweated and worked so hard, my favorite child had a baby.

My oldest, my very heart, was in a horrific car accident. The car rolled over, the glass shattered, and my favorite child walked out of it without a scratch.

You may have heard in the news a couple of years ago about my third child, my oldest son. He was attacked by a group in Asheville, his cheekbone and glasses broken, and left in a parking lot. It was on the local news. What the news didn’t say was that he is the favorite child of Laura Hankins Rand, who was at the place of business the next morning, demanding an answer for what had happened in that lighted parking lot with security guards inside the store.

And it’s not just about when they are in pain or life-threatening situations. That sense of favoritism arises when a child, a favorite, is teased by classmates. Or when he gets 2nd place in the spelling bee. When she is in the school play and lights up the entire gym or makes the valedictory speech at graduation. And when his or her heart is broken by an adolescent crush or as an adult by a spouse. The child who needs me in that moment, my focused attention, my lap, my shoulder, my praise, my laughter, my discipline (yes, even that), is my absolute favorite.

Sophie’s Choice it is not, thankfully. There is an undrainable well inside of parents. It is given either in the labor and delivery room or upon leaving the hospital as a gift of grace. No child can use it up. No number is too many for each to receive the full scope of it. It is not divisible, only multiplicable. There may be some trigonometry involved. Not sure.

Now I experience this same bounty of love with my grandchildren. I had only one for 6 ½ years, and in July my second was born. The first one expressed some attempt at grappling with the measure and limits of love. He said he understood that now I love the baby more than him. I sat him down, looked him in the eye, and said, “Absolutely not. I love him. I love him in his own special way with all my heart. But I will never love anyone more than you. You are you and I have special love for you. The baby has his own special love. Do you understand me?” I hope he did.

Should you ever run into me and just can’t hold back your question, go ahead. Ask me on any given day who my favorite child is. I just might smile properly, lower my eyes, and say, “Favorite? Oh, I love them all exactly the same!”



Sunday, February 2, 2014

When Celebrities Die



Today Philip Seymour Hoffman died--a truly gifted actor who apparently battled some pretty nasty demons, like many other artists do. And when I heard the news, I was shocked and saddened.

Just a couple of months ago it was Paul Walker, of Fast & Furious fame, who died with tragic irony in a horrific car accident. Before that Cory Monteith, James Gandolfini. And in recent years we have seen the deaths of Whitney Houston, Heath Ledger, Michael Jackson, and Steve Jobs, among others.

Those are tragic because they were in the prime of life--many of them right around my age, some quite a bit younger. But we're also saddened when we lose a childhood icon like Bob Denver of Gilligan's Island, or music legend Lou Reed, or the great actress Jean Stapleton.

The way this always plays out in social media seems to be this: Everyone is shocked and wants to offer an R.I.P. or post a favorite quote or clip or song because that person has touched them in some way.

And then, in a few days--sometimes in a matter of hours--some person decides that too much is being made of this celebrity's death and creates a meme with a photo of an emaciated child who is clearly dying from malnutrition or a homeless person in the snow and some variation on this theme: "Actor dies of a drug overdose, and millions mourn. Thousands of children die every day, and no one mourns."

And people see the meme, and nod their head sagely, and don't want to be lumped with the shallow masses, and they pass it along. Or they come up with their own commentary about the sad state of affairs when people care more about a celebrity than these suffering people.

First of all: It is simply not true that nobody knows or cares cares about or mourns the loss of those little ones, or Syrian refugees, or the homeless people who have frozen to death in the recent winter weather, or whoever is being juxtaposed with whichever celebrity has recently died. Their suffering and death is heartbreaking and tragic and ever-present and completely overwhelming in its enormity.

But there is no reason that people should be made to feel shallow for expressing sadness over the death of one person they've never met as opposed to those other millions they've never met. Just because Philip Seymour Hoffman battled a drug addiction and he was famous, did his life also not have value?

It's disturbing to me that celebrities are often treated as if they're not humans with feelings--actresses like Anne Hathaway and Gwynneth Paltrow who are despised for no apparent reason, the famous couple whose marriage troubles are splashed all over magazine covers, young celebrities whose fame seems to trip them up at every turn. Whenever I read some harsh criticism or see personal details of something that's none of my business, it makes me thankful I'm not famous.

In their death, too, this idea that it's shallow to mourn their passing seems to imply that they're not real people whose lives have value. Or that if we mourn them, we're assigning greater value to them than to others whose deaths are equally tragic. It's true, we don't know those people personally. But they are people whose work touches our lives in some way, and obviously some deaths will touch us more than others.

Many times, too, I think what we really feel is our own mortality. It's true that I'm extremely unlikely to die of a heroin overdose, but this is a guy my age, and now he's dead. A guy with a family and a very successful career. A guy who by all accounts was a nice person, a hard-working actor, a professional. A guy who had issues that he ultimately couldn't overcome.

I have enjoyed watching his films and seeing him grow as an actor over the years. I love the fact that a guy who wasn't movie-star good-looking was respected and honored because he was good at what he did. I'm sad for him that drugs were something he couldn't shake, and terribly sorry for his family, who now face a world without him in it.

I'm sad about it, and I'm not going to apologize for being sad.

Friday, January 31, 2014

On My Husband's Birthday: Connecting the Dots



I believe that life is chaotic, a jumble of accidents, ambitions, misconceptions, bold intentions, lazy happenstances, and unintended consequences, yet I also believe that there are connections that illuminate our world, revealing its endless mystery and wonder. --David Moranis

Today is my husband's birthday, and birthdays always make me reflect on the "It's a Wonderful Life"-ishness of our connection to the people who come into our lives. I don't know to what extent I really agree with all of the quote above, but in a general way, I do. So much of life seems to revolve around choices (what if I had chosen this instead of that?) and chance encounters (what if I hadn't happened to be where I was right then?), and when those choices and chance encounters all point in the same direction, that's when you think maybe there's such a thing as fate.

The truth is, my husband and I were connected before we connected. I mean that in a literal way, but there's definitely a cosmic sense in which those connections were there to pave the way for us to meet. 

The Guy

When my sister was a junior in high school, I was a sophomore in college. That was the year she started talking about a guy named Garroll among her group of friends. 

"Wait," I said to her when she pointed out a skinny guy with a friendly face in a photo she had taken. "Are you saying Garroll, with a G?"

"Yes," she explained. "His dad's name is Gary, and his mom's middle name is Carol, so they combined them."

Truthfully, the name didn't faze me much--at our high school, there were a lot of unusual names--guys named Royster and Spivey, and girls named Johnna and Shalie. So Garroll didn't seem so odd.

Over the years after high school, the two of them--my sister and Garroll--remained friends, and I heard about him from her. Since they both were single for so long, I thought maybe, since they were such good friends, they might end up together, but it seems they never really thought of each other that way.

The Sister

When I was in my first job out of college, there was a teenager who worked in the mail room after school, and I learned through my sister that it was Garroll's little sister, Lerenda (also a combination of the parents' names). Since I had another friend who worked in the mail room, I interacted with her a fair amount--a very nice girl.

After she went away to college, she came back and met and married a guy I knew through another close friend. She and I went to the same church, and when her first child was born, I was on the church "dinner brigade" to bring meals to families with newborns.

Occasionally, her brother would visit the church, and I spoke to him a couple of times--mostly, he was just confirming that my sister was around. I was nothing more than Carolyn's married sister at that point.

The Mom

For a while, my parents and Garroll's parents went to the same church, so they've known each other for years. When Lerenda was still in high school, she wanted to go on a missions trip with the same organization my brother had gone with earlier, so their family (minus Garroll) came over to our house for them to learn more about my brother's experience.

His mom taught kindergarten at the school my son went to from 1st to 7th grade--had we moved back to North Carolina a year earlier, she would have been his kindergarten teacher. It was a small school, though, so she knew him, and I saw a lot of her at school functions.

Several of her closest friends are women I have been connected with in various ways over the years--women I have worked with, women who taught my son.

The Reunion

In 2008, when I had been divorced for a while, our high school had a decade reunion for everyone who went to school there in the 80s. My sister and I were the representatives for our respective classes, but the process of planning the reunion was somewhat stressful because the woman coordinating the whole thing was the control-freakiest control freak I've ever encountered. I was so fed up with her that I ended up not putting a lot of energy into trying to convince my classmates to come.

So, when the reunion weekend got there, only a handful of people from my class came, and I spent time hanging around with my sister's class. At the Saturday picnic lunch, I was sitting with a group that included my sister and Garroll, and another guy from their class came over and said something to Garroll, calling him "Gerald."

I was incensed: "Did he just call you Gerald?" He shrugged it off, but he seemed amused that it made me so indignant on his behalf. And that moment was when the dots--and he and I--finally connected.


The Connection

It took a whole year after that of talking and spending time together before we really knew we wanted to be together, and between that reunion and our wedding, it was almost exactly two years.

I'm not going to say that it was fate, but today, when I'm celebrating the birth of this man who became my husband, I am awfully glad those connections all lined up in such a way that we ended up together.

Happy birthday to you, love!


Sunday, January 26, 2014

A Writer Writes



Ever since I started writing this blog, I've been thinking a lot about writing: Why are humans compelled to write things down? Why am I, in particular, compelled to write? What makes good writing—and what makes people want to read what's written?

In the movie Throw Momma from the Train, Billy Crystal plays a writing teacher who, although he regularly has to listen to and give feedback on some truly awful writing, encourages his students by saying, "Remember: A writer writes, always." I suppose the point of that is that writing is something that takes practice, just like any other skill. And just like any other skill, it doesn't develop overnight.

Part of the reason I started writing this blog is that very quotethere are a lot of details about that movie that I've forgotten, but that exhortation has stuck with me. You can't be a writer if you don't actually write. But more than that, I wonder if you can be a writer in the truest sense if nobody reads what you've written. John Cheever said, “I can’t write without a reader. It’s precisely like a kiss — you can’t do it alone.” 

It's certainly true that Anne Frank wrote in her diary with no thought of anyone ever reading what she wrote. But what gives her words power is not just that she wrote them down, but that she wrote them and we read them.

Writing, it seems to me, is a lot like singing. As long as you went to school, you can probably do both to at least a rudimentary degree, but your voice needs to be developed if anyone's going to want to hear you. 

I've written a lot over the years that I've gotten paid for (and in fact, I should be working on an article right now), but the type of writing I've gotten paid for is the kind of writing where you're really not supposed to notice the writer: catalog copy, marketing blurbs, factual articles, press releases. That writing, sticking with the singing analogy, is like singing in a choir, where the point is to sound like a choir, and not a bunch of individual voices.

I used to supervise a writer who had a very distinct (if a little rough technically) writing voice, and he always wanted to write in that voice. No, no, no, I had to tell him over and overyou need to write in the voice of the organization, not in your own voice. It's a press release, not a poem. But it was a bit like having Bono or Bob Dylan in a choir. It's always going to sound like Bono or Bob Dylan surrounded by choir singers.

But the non-choir writingthe solo stuffis a very different thing. It is your voice, and your voice alone that is heard. 

It used to be that if you wanted an audience for your words, you had to convince someone to publish them. Submissions, proposals, rejections...blood, sweat, and tears. But in today's micropublishing world of the internetthe blogosphere—anyone can publish his or her own words. And blogging has become the karaoke of writing—you don't have to be original or good to do it, and there is plenty out there that is mediocre at best. And I've thrown myself into that karaoke pile, grabbing the microphone and belting it out and hoping it's decent.

Or maybe karaoke isn't the right analogy. Maybe, since my audience is mostly made up of people who know me, it's more like being a church soloist. There are a very few people who still know me who know that I used to occasionally sing in church. I don't have a showy voice, or a powerful voice. What I have is a nice, competent singing voice, and in a small church, it was fine for a solo in the Christmas service or the occasional Sunday morning. But certainly no one was telling me I should try for a recording contract or anything like that.

On the other hand, a church soloist is most often asked to singor, in any case, there's a slot in the service that needs to be filled, so even if he or she offers to sing, it's not really a weird thing to do. But with blogging, the process does feel a little weird, honestly. You write something, put it on the internet, and then, to make sure it gets read, you tell your friends and acquaintances, "Hey, I wrote this thing if you want to check it out."

There's a nakedness to singing or writing, too. Any time a person sings in public or writes something for other people to read, it's exposing oneself to the possibility of criticism or ridicule or indifferencebut more than that, you have to be willing to be a little naked, and sometimes not be so good.

When my son was in elementary school, he started taking band in the 5th grade, and they played their first concert at Christmas. You could tell it was music, but it was pretty spectacular in its awfulness. But it was a K-12 school, so after the 5th graders played, you heard the middle school band, and it was amazing the difference a year or two made in their skill level. And then, at the end, the high school band played, and by that point they were actually very good. It was really good to see that your child had the potential to progress to that level and it wouldn't always sound like that.

Now, don't misunderstand—if I felt like my writing sounded like the 5th grade band concert, I wouldn't share it. I do, I'm pretty sure, have a nice, competent writing voice—certainly, given what I do for a living, I have a good grasp on the mechanics of writing. But competence isn't a very lofty goal for a writer, I don't think.

In order to be a good writer, you have to write, and write, and write some more. And I have to admit, the existence of blogging helps in that process, and I'm grateful to have a few people who want to hear what I have to say. I want to be able to call myself a writer, and a writer writes. Always.







Monday, January 6, 2014

My Favorite People on Facebook



I understand that we consume a lot of content here on the internet, and that people have to keep generating more and more content for all of us to consume. And I realize that if you're one of those content creators, lists are an easy thing to churn out--but why is it that so many of those lists seem to be so negative?

We've all seen them:  "Ten People You Want to Avoid at the Office." "Twelve Facebook Statuses You Should Never Post." "Things You Should Definitely Not Wear if You Are Over 40." Even in the yoga world, where it's supposed to be all about non-judgment, I see things like "The Twelve Most Annoying People in Your Yoga Class." And of course: "The Fifteen Most Annoying Friends on Facebook."

Really? Why do we do this? Sure, we all know those people (not the yoga ones, though--honestly, I don't know who these people have in their studios, but it's not something I've encountered). But although I will admit I have read a few of those lists, I would never actually share them on Facebook.

Even if 60% or so of my Facebook friends are actually real-life acquaintances rather than actual friends, why would I want them to read that, see themselves in the list, and become self-conscious about the fact that they've been annoying? And am I not probably one of those annoying types to someone else?

Maybe people think it's a good way to give those annoying people a subtle hint, but I don't really see it that way. It just seems a little mean-spirited because, after all, no one has a gun to our heads forcing us to have those people on our friends list. Why can't we just let people be who they are and not be so hard on them about those little things?

To reverse that trend, I'm offering my own list. Here, in no particular order, are some of my favorite people on Facebook:

  1. People I knew as a kid who have turned into really interesting adults. Everybody (well, everybody over a certain age) has at least one friend on Facebook that they haven't actually seen in 20 or 30 years, but they found you, or you found them--the guy who was a little nerdy and asked your best friend to the prom, or the girl you hung out with that your parents weren't entirely thrilled with. I have a lot of those friends--and it's been fun to see how they turned out. A couple of guys I interact with a decent amount on Facebook are guys I went to high school with and I really don't remember ever having a conversation with them when we were in high school--but the somewhat nerdy guy who asked my friend to the Christmas social is the person I'm most looking forward to seeing at our class reunion next year. Go figure.
  2. In the same vein, people I have worked with in the past and really only saw through a professional lens. There's a woman who takes beautiful wildlife photographs, and I would never have suspected her of being artistic. A guy who was an accountant where I used to work, and we butted heads a lot, also has an artistic bent, and he likes to bake bread. Who knew? An IT guy I worked with posts the most interesting articles about science, with thoughtful commentary.
  3. My son's friends/my friends' kids/young relatives. I know everyone is saying that teenagers are abandoning Facebook, and maybe they are, but I'm glad at least a few of them are still around and on my friends list. It's good to be reminded of what it was like to be 15 or 19 or 22, and also to see how  it's different being that age now than it was 25 or 30 years ago. I hear so much about "kids these days," but these young people keep me from lumping them all into a big, homogenous group. They're individuals, and the truth is, they're really cool people.
  4. On the other end of that spectrum, people who are my mom's age. First of all, yay for them, for even wading into the realm of social media. I've noticed with this group that they mostly like or comment on other people's posts and don't post much themselves, but it's a nice way for them to keep in touch with what their kids and grandkids are doing. And knowing they're there serves as a filter sometimes--I do think before I post something about whether it's something I want my mom, or my mother-in-law, or my husband's aunt to see.
  5. Local people. For me, this is an important group, because sometimes, even though I moved here three and a half years ago, I still feel like I hardly know anyone here. But there are 30 people or so on my friends list who are people I've met since I've been here (although a few of them have since moved away), and it's nice to have that concrete reminder that I actually have gotten to know some really great people.
  6. People whose politics and beliefs are different from mine. OK, so maybe "favorite people" might not be entirely accurate on this one, at least when I consider the group as a whole--but I do think it's important to have these people. While I don't want a steady diet of their political or ideological posts, neither is it healthy to surround myself only with people who think like I do. Some of these people are people I genuinely do like--some I love dearly, since I'm related to them or have a long association with them--and I think it's a good way to avoid the black-and-white "damn liberals"/"idiot conservatives" dichotomy that it's all too easy to fall into. The fact is that there are lovely people who hold a variety of views.
  7. Kindred spirits who have become my Facebook friends without having actually met in person. I really enjoy this category of people, although my husband thinks it's a little weird. This a small, select group--a couple of women in particular who are friends with a woman I sort of knew in college, and all of them became my Facebook friends after interacting on a mutual friend's post. I am certain that if the four of us ever got together in person, a fun time would be had by all. Sadly, this is unlikely to happen since we're spread out all over the country, but one of them is not too far away, and I hope to meet her in person sometime.
  8. People who post baby pictures. This is one that often makes the "most annoying people on Facebook" lists, which only makes me think that those lists are written by cranky people I wouldn't want to know. I love seeing pictures of people's babies and kids and grandkids. The back-to-school and Halloween pictures make me happy every year. I have a couple of friends who are a little bit delinquent, in my opinion, about posting enough pictures of their babies. Maybe they're sensitive about being on the annoying list, but I say keep 'em coming. I've been known to post baby pictures myself, and my son is 20 years old!
  9. Those people I don't know that well and who aren't all that active but who periodically like or comment on my stuff. Maybe it's just me, but that always gives me a warm, fuzzy feeling--it's like I've gone back to high school and some cool kid stops me in the hall to pay me a compliment. It's just unexpected and nice.
  10. The people I can always count on to like or comment on my stuff. I have one friend in particular who only gets on Facebook for about an hour a day, during her lunch break at work, and when I suddenly have a whole bunch of notifications, I can usually bet that she's been on. Apparently I'm one of those people to some of my friends, because once a friend asked me if I was upset with her, which baffled me. "No," I said--"why?" "Well," she said, "you just haven't liked or commented on any of my posts in the last couple of days."
Do some of those same people also fall into the annoying categories on those other lists? Maybe so, but I think it's better to see people in a positive light, because we could all stand a little grace to be extended when it comes to putting ourselves out there on the internet. It's easy enough to see little irritations, but I'm trying to make a habit of looking for the good, and I might as well start with the people in my (virtual) world.

Thursday, January 2, 2014

Twenty Years Ago




Twenty years ago, gas cost $1.11 a gallon (well, that was the national average, anyway). Bill Clinton had just taken office as President. Tonya Harding had someone whack Nancy Kerrigan in the knee and out of Olympic competition. David Letterman hosted the Oscars ("Uma, Oprah. Oprah, Uma."), and Forest Gump won for best picture. Whitewater was the big news story.

I lived on South Boulevard in Nyack, New York. And on this day twenty years ago, I was in Good Samaritan Hospital on a snowy day, about to give birth to a baby boy.

Get two or more women who have had children together and it's inevitable--the labor and delivery stories will start at some point. And the reason for that is that even if we can't tell you what we had for lunch yesterday, or we forget what we were at the grocery store for, we remember every detail of the day we brought a child into the world. My mom can still tell you the details of all of her deliveries, and the youngest of us is almost 45. It's kind of a big deal. So sue us.

But today, on the day my boy turns 20, I'm not celebrating the details of the delivery--I'm celebrating the twenty years that have followed it. Since it turned out that I only had the one child, I am awfully glad it turned out to be this one.

This is the boy who, as a toddler, never wanted anyone to be left out. One of the teachers at his daycare told me that he always seemed to know how to include the kids who were on the fringes.

The boy who wanted his mom to have pretty things: Seeing one of those jewelry store commercials with the special Valentine's Day diamond necklace, he said, with great feeling, "Oh, Mommy, I wish you could have that!"--which, to be honest, made me grateful he didn't have access to that much money, because I despise those mass-produced pieces of jewelry. Him wishing I could have it was gift enough for me.

The boy who had a solid grasp on the concept of sarcasm by the time he was in the 2nd grade. He was with a friend and the friend's babysitter, and he informed them that he was being sarcastic with some comment he had made. The babysitter asked him, "Do you even know what sarcastic means?" And he responded: "It's like, if you're on a date and you walk into a pole, and she says, 'Niiiiiice.'"

This boy, said his fourth-grade teacher, was not necessarily a leader, but he wasn't a follower, either. He wasn't afraid to stand alone rather than go with the crowd if he didn't want to. Would it be nice to have a kid who is a leader? Sure, I suppose so... but you have to admire a kid who will stand alone if need be.

This boy told his father, when we were in the midst of the worst nastiness while we were going through our divorce, "When you talk to Mommy, it's like you keep using a hammer when you should maybe use a screwdriver." I couldn't have said it better myself, kid.

When he was applying to get into the high school he went to, he needed letters of recommendation from various people, and I've saved the one from his school counselor because her description of him was so beautiful that it still makes me tear up with gratitude. "Though I am a clinician, and therefore often describe students I work with in clinical terms, this is what I most wish to emphasize to you about [him]," she wrote. "He is a delightful person." And, she went on to say, "He is, in fact, one of those lovely people with whom the world is graced, who seeks and is attracted to harmony."

My boy is not easy to get to know, and there are things that are hard for him in life because he is different from most people. But that difference means that I made it through the entirety of his teen years without him ever being disrespectful or nasty or any of those other things that people think of when they think of teenagers.

That difference is the reason I still think of him as my boy and will fight to protect that tender heart of his. For twenty years now, I've been the one who's lucky enough to see facets of him that others miss, because they're not looking, or because they're expecting something from him that's not there. But what is there is so worth finding, and anyone who makes the effort to see him as I see him will find a real treasure.

Happy birthday, dear boy of mine.