Author Archives: Jane

Growing Older…

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GROWING OLDER…

…AND WISER…I THINK

Mistakes have never worried me.  Even big ones.  Throughout the years I moved from success to failure to success again, looking at all the big mistakes I made and knowing, if I hung on a while longer, I would realize some valuable lesson helping to make my struggles worthwhile.  Little did I realize all the little mistakes lying around unnoticed like the tiny threads I clip from my quilting pieces and that someday these tiny threads would weave together into a spider’s web, ready to catch and ensnare me as a juicy treat for some unseen monster lying in wait in dark corners.

In my senior year of high school, we had a memorable substitute in my English class.  She was a young black woman, which in itself might be memorable for this young white girl in an all-white school.  But that wasn’t what caught our attention.  It was her gentle smile beaming out as a spirit of kindness toward us, radiating a joy for life.

During her one hour as our teacher, she fired our imaginations with stories about her interesting travels to exotic foreign lands, about falling in love, and finally, about getting married.  She had been everywhere the storybooks tell about.  How wonderful to talk with a person who had really sipped coconut milk in glorious places!  “Oh, yes,” she assured us.  “This is your time to explore life.  You must travel.”

With quiet excitement, she told us about meeting her husband and getting married, a new adventure she could now savor just as she had the foreign countries of her travels.  I remember being inspired by her to see the world.  But more than that, because we asked, I remember her recommendations for us as we got older.

Drinking in her enthusiasm for life, we wanted her advice.  She was one of those rare adults who talked to us teens with respect, who seemed to understand our hunger for new experiences and excitement.  She wasn’t telling us to plan for the future, get serious, and put away our childish thoughts.  She encouraged our dreams.  She was someone to trust.  She had time to talk with us and to take our questions seriously.

A young girl across the room raised her hand.  She asked about marriage, wanting to know if the young teacher had traveled with her husband.  “Oh no,” she said. “You have to travel when you’re single.  Don’t get married too young.  You have lots of time.”  How much time, someone wanted to know.  My ears perked up.  I knew I could count on her answer.

I had had boyfriends in high school, but nothing serious.  There were dates to the dances and proms and a few movies.  There was even an older boyfriend in my senior year who was safely tucked away for most of the year at a California college until we figured out that ‘love’ looked brighter from a distance than when we were sitting next to each other.  We each moved on to other things.

In high school, loved ice skating, singing in Chorale, traveling with family and friends, playing cards, sewing, dancing…and someday…boys.  I figured, like everyone else, I would eventually marry, not because I was anxiously waiting, but because it seemed like one of those requirements for life.  I was fired with curiosity.  How long should I wait before I thought about marriage?

We all held our breath.  The young teacher had a relaxed smile on her face.  “Oh, don’t get married too young.  There’s so much to do.  Don’t even think about it before you’re twenty-five.”  I sucked in my breath.  My brain stopped.  Twenty-five?!  Why, I would be dead by then.  Well, maybe not.  But I might as well be dead at twenty-five, because that was old.

My husband and I today have some great pictures of our two children.  There are the standard naked baby pictures I intended to blackmail each of them with one day.  And pictures of Justin and Jamie at 5 and 7, in Dad’s long t-shirts, painting the bedroom wall.  Crawling through mud.  Laughing and throwing pillows at each other.  Sleeping angelically.  Swimming.  A special laughable photo of Jamie shows her, one month old, in a red flannel sleeper, wearing a candy striped elf hat, and looking like a soft tree ornament.  That picture is special to me for another reason.

I remember the night at my parents’ home when we took it.  We were all in the living room of Grammy and Grandpa’s house, passing baby Jamie around, chatting, tickling her chin, and enjoying being together.  Jamie’s Grandpa, my own father, was holding her, and I had been admiring her quiet sweet face for several minutes.  Slowly I raised my eyes from Jamie to gaze at Grandpa,…but he had vanished.  In his place were the wrinkles, the gray thinning hair, long silver eyebrows, and quiet smile of my grandfather who had been dead many years.  I blinked quickly, and grandfather melted back into my father’s familiar face.  For one moment, one brief moment, I knew he was old.

Years later, watching Jamie run across the backyard, I remember standing at the edge of the patio and plucking the first gray hair out of my long brown hair.  With disgust, I threw it into the backyard grass.  There!  Gone.  Not old, yet.

Needless to say, that gray hair grew back in the company of others.  Still, Victor didn’t have any.  He would laugh and tease.  He was older than me by years, but younger by hairs.

As gray hairs persisted and accumulated in numbers too great to pluck, I searched for new ways to explain them.  Eventually, as a classroom teacher, gray hairs were valuable evidence of my maturity and wisdom for the young students in my classrooms.  I was still young, but at least old enough to be wise.

Like my students, like all ‘kids’ today, I has always been in a hurry.  Every day I pushed to see what new thing I could experience:  shaving my legs in 7th grade, high school with lockers and a huge campus, a driver’s permit and finally a license, college applications, dorm life, a really serious boyfriend, jobs, paychecks, rent, cooking, phone bills.  Each new goal accomplished, I would set my sights on a future challenge and hurry to reach it.

In college, I remember watching television personality George Plimpton interview a man who had made a list of all the things he wanted to accomplish in life before he was 30.  What a great idea!  I made my own list.  I was in a hurry.  I wanted to get life organized.  Get on with it.  Make sure to live it…before I was old.

Moving from college into the work world, years ago, I remember people my age discussing their jobs and what they liked about them.   I was always amazed when someone mentioned their good retirement plan.  Who would even think to ask about that?  I wasn’t going to retire.  Old people retired.  Or, more likely, they just shriveled up to the size of a walnut and rolled under a tree…I wasn’t ever going to have to worry about that.

Much to my amazement, I did reach the ripe old age of 25.  Yet, it didn’t bother me, because by that time, I’d discovered old age was really 35.  Today, at the middle age of 45, 35 sounds pretty young.  I can see how Jamie and Justin might think I’m old.  They tell me so.  But I’m sure they’re teasing.  Thankfully, looks are deceiving, and even if I do have gray hair, I always make sure to remind them how lucky they are to have a mother with such a youthful view of life.  At least…that was what I was saying until the day that Jamie dyed her hair.

On that particular Saturday morning, my mind was focused on the perfection of life.  For three months, we had arranged to live in the middle of a Tennessee farm, eating garden vegetables, laughing and chatting daily with my aunt and uncle.  I loved looking out the kitchen window each day after school, watching Justin fish in the pond down the hill.

New to the small Tennessee town, both of our kids had met friends from the countryside.  On that perfect Saturday morning, Jamie was due home shortly from a fun overnight at the home of one of her new Tennessee friends.  Victor left to pick her up, and the sound of tires on gravel announced their return.  Two car doors slammed shut.

I heard them approach, laughing and talking, footsteps on the wooden deck, and front door squeaking open, when what to my wondering eyes should appear.  Jamie, huddled under a jacket draped over her head, went whizzing past me through the living room faster than a speeding bullet, wisps of hair trailing out under the jacket.  Whoa!  Wait a wispy moment…is that purple I see?

Now, a year earlier I had given her tentative approval for blue hair—only after she had assured me it was a wash-out color, not permanent, try-it-for-a-day-or-two color.  Even if I were able to see any blue streaks in her long brown tresses, my imagination pictured a gentle blue-brown, a deco brownish-very-brown blue that blended ever so nicely with a brown-blue wardrobe.  I was a perfectly modern mom.  I could be open-minded enough to accept a brown-brown-bluish hairstyle for a day or two.  And then…it would wash out.

Needless to say, on this particularly perfect Tennessee Saturday morning, as I stared after the girl who had just passed by, disappearing into the back of the house…I was not prepared!  Purple, bright definite violet, shouting PURPLE.  It was the favorite color for my 5th grade students, the purple marker that always went dry first, the crayon always missing from the box.  My friend Melody had a beautiful purple dress that always perked me up when she wore it.  But nothing could have prepared me for the color purple on top of my daughter’s head.  Wow!

Take a deep breath, I told myself.  Remember.  You’re open-minded.  It’s just a color.  Thinking:  Holy ____!  THAT’S purple!!

Saying:  Boy, this time the color really worked.  Oh,…a new brand, huh?  Great. Thinking:  Holy COW!  They’re going to kick her out of school!

Saying:  Are you sure they will let you go to school like this?  Remember, this is a small, conservative town.  It’s not like the big city…a kid came with green hair last month?  Great.  Thinking:  OH, DEAR!  They’re going to run us out of town.  Uncle Jimmie’s reputation is ruined. 

Saying:  Well, I hope McEwen High School is ready for this.  Thinking:  Won’t Uncle Jimmie be surprised!

He was.  He handled it well.  Especially for a country gentleman in his sixties.  I have never been certain if Uncle Jimmie was as relaxed and accepting as he seemed when he opened his front door with a big smile.  “Boy, look at Jamie’s pretty hair!”  We sat down to our garden dinner, laughed, and talked,–no one aware of my panic of fears that the following Monday morning I would get a call from the high school telling me purple hair fit into the same category as shorts, beards, and mustaches…all prohibited.

Monday morning…school came and went.  Safe.  Two days, three days  passed, but I was never called to the principal’s office.  Thirty days later, purple was still purple, and we were rereading the label on the box, wondering if washout color would really wash out before we moved back to our big Arizona city home next month.

It didn’t.

We packed boxes and loaded clothing, bicycles, television, computer, and printer into the U-Haul.  As Vic slowly pulled away from our temporary home, turning around to wave goodbye to Uncle Jimmie, we barely thought about purple.

Fortunately, returning to a big city, I felt certain we could survive until purple did finally wash down the drain.  Except for church.  During our three months in Tennessee, we had confirmed one thing.  Churches are for old people.  Small and large, in all of the southern churches we visited, the membership was at least 50% ‘old.’

In Phoenix, our home church was no different.  Worse yet, it wasn’t only old…it was Dutch.  Betty and Barnie were dear friends, but they were over seventy years of age, Dutch immigrants to the southwest from way back.  I can’t imagine anything more conservative than Dutch Old, and friends though they were, I didn’t look forward to explaining purple hair to them on our first Sunday morning back.  I worried so much about Betty and her Dutch friends that I didn’t see the huge spider web slowly forming in the corner of my life.

Betty has one of those engaging faces you just love to look at.  She doesn’t just look at you, she looks at you with a smile, a genuine smile, and she is one of those people who asks you questions and waits, smiling at you, waiting for you to answer, listening to every word you say.  Her warm face is framed with puffs of white hair, and you almost forget her age because she makes you feel so important.

Considering their ages, I was doubly impressed three years earlier when Betty and her husband Barnie were two of the first names on the sign-up for a church camping trip.  Very impressed.  It caught me short when Barnie asked if we could find a level camping spot for them.  He reminded me of Betty’s crippling arthritis.

I studied her the following Sunday and noticed, indeed, that moving was a supreme effort for her, one that involved severe pain.  Even after three years of being in the church with Betty, I hadn’t noticed.  Her face and smile held that much power.

Home now from Tennessee, the inevitable reunion wouldn’t wait forever.  Finally, on our first Sunday back, looking out of our car to the people gathering on the sidewalk outside the church building, I tried to imagine walking into church with Jamie of the Purple Hair.  Thankfully, I figured Betty liked us enough to forgive us.  I only hoped the rest of the church elders would follow her lead.

Resolutely, purple as ever, we opened the car door and stepped out to begin the long walk.   Some people turned directly in our direction, opened their eyes a bit wider, and whispered to me as I came close, “What did you say when Jamie dyed her hair?”  Their questions implied their own answers, “Wow!”

Other people were more discreet, focusing intently on their conversations as we approached.  But as we passed by I could feel the movement of their eyes behind us, their glances following and grabbing hold of our family and our purple hair.  I knew what they were thinking, “Wow!”  The first hour was the hardest.  Eventually, we settled comfortably into church life, purple hair and all, one of the family again.  I was simply not prepared for Betty.

Later that same week at a church potluck, most people had finished eating, and in the dining hall I sipped the last of my coffee.  People were streaming through the halls to and from classrooms.  Men wandered about, picking up the remaining dinner trash and folding chairs.  Betty peeked in the door, saw me, and came to sit in the chair opposite me with her open smile.  She leaned forward.  “I love your daughter’s hair.”

I paused.  How did I handle this, I wondered?  I needed to be tactful.  All of the young kids of the church looked so alike.  I could name only a handful of them, and there were three related families with a pool of ten children that I still could not successfully sort into the correct households.  I didn’t want to embarrass Betty by pointing out that she didn’t know our family yet.  “My daughter?  Do you know who she is?”

“Yes, she’s the one with the purple hair.  It’s so pretty.  I always wanted to do that to my hair.  I just wanted to make sure to find you and let you know.  I’ve got to get to class now.”

I was speechless, dangling from the middle of my web.

I aged a lifetime in that moment, admiring Betty’s youth and hoping someday to be as young as she.

 

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ATTITUDE

The longer I live, the more I realize the impact of attitude on life.  Attitude, to me, is more important than facts.  It is more important than the past, than education, than money, than circumstances, than failures, than successes, than what other people think or say or do.  It is more important than appearance, giftedness or skill.  It will make or break a company…a church…a home.  The remarkable thing is we have a choice every day regarding the attitude we will embrace for that day.  We cannot change our past…we cannot change the fact that people will act in a certain way.  We cannot change the inevitable.  The only thing we can do is play on the one string we have, and that is our attitude…I am convinced that life is 10% what happens to me and 90% how I react to it.  And so it is with you…we are in charge of our attitudes.”          –Charlie Rhyan

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WHAT You Can Do  TODAY TO AGE SUCCESSFULLY

Reprinted from the book WE LIVE TOO SHORT and DIE TOO LONG, by Walter M. Bortz, M.D.,, published by Bantam Books, 1991.

1.  Do at least 30 minutes of sustained, rhythmic, vigorous exercise four times a week.  Seek out patterns, times, places, and contacts that make exercise as much a part of your day as eating and sleeping.

2.   Eat like a bushman.   Return to the habit of eating what nature first laid on our tables:  fruits, whole grains, vegetables, and lean meat.

3.   Get as much sleep and rest as you need.  Make quiet time a major priority. Exercisers, in particular, must acknowledge that their bodies require respite from workouts and the general clamor of the day.

4.   Maintain your sense of humor and deflect anger.  Make each day an opportunity for optimism for yourself and others.  A positive mind-set creates the expectation that something good is about to happen and opens the door to new options for success.

5.   Set goals and accept challenges that force you to be as alive and creative as         possible.  Nature operates in such a way that growth and living are nearly synonymous.  When one stops, so does the other.  Creativity is not confined to the first part of your life.  In fact, accumulated knowledge and experience should make the later decades even more congenial to new accomplishment.

6.   Don’t depend on anyone else for well-being.  A well developed sense of self-efficacy is the crucial link to a long and meaningful existence.  We all need to maintain mastery, autonomy, and independence in our daily lives.

7.   Be necessary and responsible.  Live outside yourself.  Beyond independence, we also need to see each day as a chance to help someone or something.  Associate with other active, involved individuals.  Sharpen your sense of duty to the Earth, which nurses us all.

8.   Don’t slow down.  Stick with the mainstream.  Avoid the shadows.  Stay     together.  Universal law dictates that natural order is ordained by only one mechanism–a well-directed, purposeful flow of energy.  Aging need not be characterized by loss.  Maintaining your energy flow is the antidote.

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Walter M. Bortz II, M.D., is one of America’s most respected and acclaimed authorities on aging.  He is former president of the American Geriatrics Society with over 35 years of clinical experience.  He co-chaired the AMA-ANA Task Force on Aging and is presently Clinical Associate Professor at Stanford University Medical School.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

 

MMM…Our Favorite Meal…

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MMM…OUR FAVORITE MEAL…

…GARBAGE SOUP AND BURNED BISCUITS

When I was finally packed and ready to leave for college, one of my biggest celebrations was the thought that I would never have to eat Garbage Soup again for the rest of my life!  My mother served Garbage Soup several times a month.  It always started with the clean-picked bones of a rib roast.  Then she would pull out twenty or more cottage cheese containers hiding small leftover portions of peas, potatoes, carrots, chicken juice, onions…any old garbage still left in the refrigerator that hadn’t sprouted mold.

No matter what the garbage consisted of, Mother held the soup together with one can each of creamed corn, chopped tomatoes, and tomato sauce.  She learned this “recipe” from her Mother, who had finally let us all in on her own secret ingredient years after we had eaten gallons of garbage soup without the secret ingredient…1 tsp of sugar for a large pot of soup.

The best part of the dinner was always the buttermilk biscuits.  We would pull fluffy, steaming biscuits apart and load them with butter and honey or jam, all the while complaining and asking, “Why do we always have to have Garbage Soup?”  Mother would just smile her knowing smile and pass the biscuits.

Some mistakes in life are corrected almost before they begin, but other mistakes live on and on.  No matter how good our intentions, these mistakes seem to have a life of their own, regenerating time and again in front of our very eyes, growing in proportion each time and taunting us with promises to return.  My personal recurring mistake is the granddaddy of them all, the major sin of world religions, the mistake that will be my downfall forever on.  I burned the biscuits.

Actually, the burned biscuits are only the tip of the iceberg.  On Garbage Soup nights Mother would ask my sister or me to make the biscuits.  Biscuits were the only food I knew how to cook when I left for college.  I had the recipe down pat: measure, mix, cut, nibble, and bake.

On that one particular night, I made the biscuits with carefree confidence.  At 400 degrees, they had risen and baked to a golden brown.  I peeked into the oven.  They were ready.  Butter and honey, ready, set, go.  But Mother still had her soup to tend and the table to set.  Just a few minutes before we sat down.  No problem.  I just turned the oven off and left the biscuits inside to stay warm.

My dad came into the kitchen, smelling dinner.  He walked to the oven and peeked in expectantly.  Sure enough, golden biscuits.  He glanced over my way, and in the way of all irritating parents, he suggested that I take the biscuits out.  “They’re done.”

“I know,” I told him in my best expert biscuit baker voice.

“Well, they’re going to burn,” he observed.

Just because he was an engineer didn’t mean he knew anything about baking biscuits!  “No they’re not!  I turned the oven off!!”  I made sure to set him straight.  I was no dummy.  With supreme parental wisdom, he walked over to smell the soup and talk with Mother, leaving me in charge.

We ate Garbage Soup and Burned Biscuits that night.  Daddy never said a word.  He just put on the butter and honey, as usual, and “enjoyed” every bite.  I didn’t have much room for biscuits that night, having eaten more than my share of humble pie.

Humility continues to knock on my door, with regularity.  For instance, would you be surprised to learn what I wanted most for Mother to cook when I came home from college?  Yep, Garbage Soup.  I bet she smiled a few secret smiles over that one.  Then there’s our fix-up house that my husband and I bought ten years later.

We mounted a long, dedicated search throughout all of Phoenix to find a special house, one that would set us apart (and above?) all the normal people.  We didn’t want a ticky, tacky house just like the neighbors down the street.  We were special.  We were meant to have a Tudor house, an antique house, different and unique, showing our own uniquely special personalities.  Luckily, we did find the house of our dreams, a Tudor with hippie-blue painted windows falling off their hinges, a dead yard, and 1000 square feet of wooden floors that needed sanding.  I wasn’t going to be a “suburban princess” picking out carpet and wall paper samples.  Not me.  I was going to be different, unique.

Ten years later, after we had resurrected our “Lazarus Home,” (my father’s name for it) I was shocked to learn that we were part of a national movement of the 1970’s that had spurred the growth of the home remodeling industry.  Thousands of people just like us had bought homes that needed fixing up with glass doorknobs, wooden floors and new plaster.   We were little people, little statistical pieces of data that had been lumped together with the general “huddled masses” to form a mega-trend.  Nothing different, or unique.  Just regular guys.  Much like my Birkenstock sandals.

In the 80’s I began teaching math workshops and had a roommate from Arizona.  She wore these ‘funky’ sandals that looked so comfortable:  Birkenstocks.  She let me try them on, and they felt great.  They were also just a bit offbeat.  Practical.  Down-to-earth leather.  I wanted a pair.

In Tempe, I searched out the only store in the valley to carry a full supply of Birkenstocks, and I chose the ever-adventurous, go-with-everything-including-winter-socks Desert Brown.  My family called them Jesus shoes.  I had ignored Birkenstocks in the 1970’s because I thought you had to have hairy legs and a rose tattoo to wear them.  However, now I knew they went with regular clothes and regular work.  They were different, practical, and unique.  They were conversation pieces.  I was special.

In the 90’s, Birkenstock lookalikes hit all of the stores and became fashion statements for my fifth grade students.  The special, one-of-a-kind $80 uniquely distinct shoes I had loved for ten years were now $15 plum, taupe, and teal teen treasures.  I was one of the crowd, a statistically counted shopper.  Melody, in the classroom next to me, asked, “How are you going to be a non-conformist now, Jane?”  The question haunted me.  Then I caved in to the inevitable.

We bought a bigger house.  We were able to let the kids have different beds, even different rooms.  Our house looked JUST like the rest of the houses in the neighborhood, desert brown stucco with a red tile roof.  We gathered paint chips, wallpaper samples, and carpet and tile–just another suburban princess, driving to work in my mini-van.  What could I do?  I was just like everyone else.

Of course, if I weren’t so filled with pride, I would have known this all along.  I am just like everyone else, I always have been.  These are silly examples of what pride will do to a person.  There are more serious situations, however.

Years ago, when I was under ten years of age, a mother made the news for killing her children.  I remember being in my bedroom working on something with my own mother, and I commented, “I just don’t know how someone could kill their own children.”  Mother knocked my socks off!  “Oh, I do.  It can happen to any of us.  There ARE days…”  I was speechless.  My own mother.  During my entire lifetime, she gave me only one spanking and no more than ten dirty looks.  She was my image of charity and kindness.  How could she understand a mother who had killed her children?  Humility, that’s how.

Years later, her favorite writer Erma Bombeck, wrote a book centered on women who had “failed” under socially and legally dictated guidelines.  But Erma understood them.  She knew…there WERE days…

Strangely, humility comes in odd doses and flees just when we need it most.  I can truly understand Timothy McVeigh, the bomber of the Oklahoma federal building.  That is not a popular thing to write or think.  This is not to say that I think he was right or sane.  But I do understand him.  How could anyone ever be so messed up in their mind?

Well, there ARE days.  I know I have had my mind twisted around its fair share of times.  I was just fortunate not to have it twist so far.  And just as I shock someone with an understanding of a murderer of 168 people, I must admit that I don’t have a full understanding of my sister.  How could she “throw her Mother away” over such “pettiness?”  Once again pride raises its ugly head to claim me as its victim.

I am special, yes.  But I am only special insofar as I admit that I am just like you, just like Timothy McVeigh, just like my sister.  We are all people of special talents and special weaknesses.  We all need love, correction, compassion, and adulation.  We are all trying to make the best of a life we think we understand most of the time.  It doesn’t call for me to agree with you.  Life still requires that I try to make a declaration of my personal understandings of life…and live it.  But I’d better be ready to eat Garbage Soup and Burned Biscuits.  There ARE days…

 

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

 

 

We Will Survive…

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WE WILL SURVIVE…

…NOTHING LASTS FOREVER

I stood in shock in front of the bathroom mirror, pulling at the curls with both hands and screaming.  Years later my mother would remember the day.  She had been 1500 miles away in Tennessee, talking with my dad on the phone.  “What’s wrong?” she asked him as my screams traveled the phone wires from Arizona to Tennessee.  Calmly, my dad answered, “Jane got her hair cut.”

For most of my 20 years I had worn my hair long.  Several times, seeking a change, I cut my hair short.  Each time, while I received compliments on my new shorter hairstyles, my neck felt uncomfortably naked.  I would touch my neck and check in mirrors trying to hold my eyes at or above the chin, forbidding them to search for long tresses of brown hair now gone.

Fortunately, my hair grew fast.  Always, within one week of my haircut, I would decide to grow my hair long again.  Thus would begin a one-year process, moving toward long hair, where I needed to create a new style monthly depending on the length of bangs that wouldn’t yet tuck behind my ears or hair on my neck that wouldn’t pull into a clasp.  Eventually, my hair would grow back to a comfortable, long stage where I could again play with it, and life was good.  These transitions had always been gentle and peaceful until that long ago Saturday.

Saturday morning had begun normally enough.  I was bored.  I had been sitting on my long, straight hair for ten years.  I was ready for “the” change.  I asked friends about salons and stylists, those places and people I had ignored for ten years.  Good news.  Juanita was having her hair done at a styling school where the prices were incredibly cheap!.  Long hair had been free.  It was hard for me to pay $40 to get it cut.  Juanita’s hair always looked stylish, even for a cheap $10 cut, and I was easily convinced.

I drove to central Phoenix, found the last parking space, and entered the salon, explaining what I wanted to the receptionist:  short, no-effort, no hassle.  “My hair is fine and straight, even though I have a lot of it.  I’m not used to fiddling with my hair, and I’m ready for a change.  I’m tired of sitting on it.  You decide.  Do something you think will look good.”

The eyes of the young male stylist widened with joyful anticipation as he came toward me across the floor.  He had been given the ultimate hairdresser’s challenge.  He was released from the boredom of half-inch trims.  His creative juices were flowing.

Long, brown strands fell to his feet.  Tiny clips refined the shape.  He set out a tray of curling rods, explaining the benefit of a perm for my straight hair.  His instructor reassured me when she came by to check.  “Use the small rods,” she told him.

“I just want body,” I told her.

“Smaller rods,” she repeated.  Pink rods were stashed, and white rods appeared with wrapping papers, smelly solutions, and 20-minute timers.

Finally, I sat again in front of the mirror.  I was ready to see the miracle; Mr. Stylist was ready to finish his Pygmalion.  White rods fell from short wet strands of brown hair.  He grabbed a comb and brush as I waited for him to create a style from the mass of tiny dripping ringlets.  All of a sudden tiny shocks of fear began to pulse through me.  Where he had exuded confidence while clipping and perming, I began to sense definite uncertainty as he stared at me, comb and brush in hand.  What now?

Tentatively, he pulled at curls with the comb.  They snapped back.  Pull, snap, pull snap, wiggle.  I shook my head, and the wriggling, bouncing curls dripped all over my plastic cape.  I tried to calm my voice as I spoke encouragingly to the young man.  “Well, so far, so good.”

He grimaced at me, as the instructor, from across the room, caught a glimpse of our silent shock.  Moving smoothly to my chair with the assurance of the master stylist, she grabbed the comb and brush from the student along with the hair blower on the table.  As she tugged at each curl with the brush, she aimed the hair blower with insistence:  STAND STRAIGHT she commanded.  One by one, wet curls were pulled straight out from my head and turned into a slight page at the end.  Her face frozen in determined concentration, she tugged half of my hair into shape, glancing every minute or so at the young man with a serious look that declared, “There, that’s how you do it.  Now get to it.”

But far from solving his problems, she made it painfully clear to everyone in the room that even her experience had not prepared us for the effect of tiny white rods on my short wet fine hair.  FRIZZ!  A mass of frizz stood out from my head, trying to turn down in style at the ends.  I was quickly becoming a fashion statement of immense proportions, Phyllis Diller, without benefit of Fang.  I swallowed my horror, thinking, “This is just the first day.  It will relax.  I can tame it down when I get home.  Actually, it looks pretty good, mod, hep.  It’s just the shock of change.  I’ll get used to it.”

The young man continued to tug and pull the other half of my hair into shape.  He didn’t really finish.  He just gave one last tug, took a step backwards, stared, and gave up.  With all hope vanquished, I handed him a large tip meant to reassure him in the face of the fear and defeat that ravaged his earlier confidence, and I left the salon–trying not to break into a run to my car and its mirror, concentrating on holding my head confidently high and keeping my hands from covering my eyes.  I was numb.  I was caught in the panic of the moment and had not yet projected the current horror forward two days to Monday morning.  Which was a temporary blessing.  Otherwise, I might have died right there in the parking lot.

I made it home, rushed past my dad to the bathroom mirror, and stood, tugging, crying, screaming, and pulling.  My mother saved my poor father from a hopeless situation with her call from Tennessee.  My screams filled the house, and she was left to imagine why.

I spent the rest of Saturday and Sunday washing and combing my hair, finally accepting reality.  The tiny curls were in no mood to relax.  Worse yet, after ten years of straight long hair, I was a hair-blower-illiterate, just barely able to blow the steam dry on the bathroom mirror.  Tugging, pulling, and blowing the curls into straight frizz…I was completely hopeless.  There I was:  a human Poodle.  Tiny tight poodle curls covered my head, a fuzzy halo around my red eyes.

I was not only a human poodle.  I was also a teacher.  Of junior high students.  Teenagers.  Their idea of a compliment was, “Hey, Miss Tod, where did you find that shirt?  Was it on sale?”  And worse than all of that, I taught in the last of the Open Schools.  I didn’t just have to face a class of 30 students.

Our school had no interior classroom walls.  All 500 seventh grade students were generally grouped into classes of 30 students at tables surrounded by bookcases and portable blackboards.  They filled an enormous open room the size of a large cafeteria.  Every school visitor or discipline problem was instantly “on stage” in front of 500 teens.  I had left school on Friday, a young, hep, long-haired regular person, a woman of the 60’s, like Peggy on Mod Squad.  Monday morning I would enter the school as a Poodle.

Even now, I remember the pain of opening the office door and stepping into the room of 500 teens, one thousand eyes.  I set my sight on my own class, way on the far side of the huge room, and began to walk the path through desks like Miss America.  Only I wasn’t smiling.  I wasn’t waving.  I wasn’t even looking.  But I heard the silent shock waves.

The noisy chatter of 500 teenagers slowly stopped.  In unison, every student drew in one gigantic  breath in shock.  They sucked the walls of the room inward, and the huge room held its breath.  I kept walking.  “Keep going,” I told myself.  “Tuesday is coming soon.”  Through the silence, a whisper from across the room floated my way.  “Look at Miss Tod.”  There wasn’t anything more to say.  That said it all!  It was the first and only time I ever found my students at a loss for words.  Bless them.

I survived.  I have also been a testimony to many students and classes since that time.  Yes, I survived.  We all survive.  No one remains a poodle forever.

 

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Beauty…

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BEAUTY…

…THROUGH THE EYES OF THE BEHOLDER

There I sat in the airplane on the Nashville runway, sifting through workshop evaluations as the plane awaited takeoff for my return to Phoenix.  In my lap I held 40 evaluations of Jane and what a “week with Jane” had meant to them…40 teachers who had watched me, listened to me, and followed my instructions for one full week.

As an elementary English teacher, I had never dreamed I would become a teacher of math for school teachers.  It was one of life’s unexpected adventures.

Ten summers earlier, looking for a fun way to get professional credits, I had enrolled in a workshop to explore the world of math through the eyes of kindergarten and first grade children.  In every activity,  sitting at a low table, knees scrinched up under my chin, playing with red and blue lima beans, amazing new insights about numbers flashed before me.

Years after receiving an A in college algebra, I could now finally see clearly, in the beans and cups I moved around on the table, the decimal values of ones, tens, hundreds and thousands. Before the end of the day, I was adding and subtracting in base five.  I called the Center that offered workshops, asking how I could get into the workshop a second time…as a “repeating” student.

In a brief chat, the man on the other end of the phone asked me a few simple questions such as ‘why’ and ‘who,’ and I was enrolled in the next math workshop “for free.”  It wasn’t until I showed up for the first class that I learned I had graduated from student to trainee. I was walking down the road to become a teacher of teachers.

Once again, the mathematical challenges were intoxicating.  Even more wonderful than the fun math was the opportunity to explore it in partnership with other eager adult learners.  Each mathematical answer led to new questions that could be explored in new and compelling ways, with blocks, beads, charts, cards, puzzles, experiments, data collection, graphs, conversation, theorizing, testing, and thinking. My own father had been an engineer, and this was the first time that I, at 35 years of age, began to understand his world.

Eventually, as I mastered the week of math concepts, I was invited to join the Center as an instructor.  Traveling around the country during summer vacations, towing bags of math materials was a serious struggle for me in the era before computers and cell phones.  But at the same time, it allowed me full and free immersion in the math world with the wonderful companionship of like-minded educators.  It was all wonderful, except for one thing.  Evaluations.

In the regular world of the classroom, teachers are always being evaluated.  The principal schedules regular visits to your classroom during the year bringing the official district forms and checklists.  Parents will call with compliments, stop by to help, and yes, sometimes call and write notes of criticism when they feel you have missed the mark.

But none of this compares with handing out 40 evaluation forms to 40 teachers who have spent $300 for a full week workshop.  On the form, there is a list of questions, each with a set of boxes for participants to check…always, sometimes and never.  After quickly checking off boxes, there are also 20 blank lines, complete with a blank back side of the evaluation form, and the participants are “invited” to write anything and everything they want about the workshop…and “you” their instructor.

All evaluations are anonymous.  Teachers gradually filter out of the room with their papers, notes and gifts, turning their evaluation forms upside down on the stack at the back of the room.  Soon, the room is empty and quiet, a complete contrast to the noise and activity of the week just finished, and you are left to collect your stack of forms.  Evaluation forms.

Tired and exhausted, you now get to decide where best to read these forms.  Alone.  With a co-teacher.  At the airport over coffee.  At the restaurant over wine.  In the airplane.  Or ignore them.  Don’t read them.  Just put them into the final envelope with your registration forms and reimbursement receipts, and send them off to the Center in California.  There were instructors who did just that.  I didn’t know how they managed it.  How could they not want to know…how had they done during the week?  What had the teachers in the workshop thought of them?  When the stack of evaluations arrived in California, what would the owners of the company be reading about them?  What about the bad evaluation?  Didn’t they want to see it first?

Even after years have passed, every instructor can sit and talk about the one evaluation form that sticks in their brain. The instructor can recite the written comments almost word for word.  No matter how many workshops, how many participants, and how many glowing evaluations, every instructor can remember the one evaluation form where the participant listed their failings.

I can remember mine.  There were three forms.  In Montana. They didn’t like the workshop.  The instructors (including me) were ill-informed, incompetent, and biased.  The instructors (including me) didn’t support the Center’s book.  They didn’t work in unison.  They contradicted each other.  The rest of the 25 evaluations were rather lukewarm; this had been a good week.  They had learned a few interesting things.  Blah, blah, blah…my mind returned over and over and over again to the glaring forms that chastised me for wasting their time.

Thank goodness for the one…bless her…one participant who took the time to mention me by name on her evaluation, complimenting my teaching style.  She will never know the saving grace of her kind words, keeping me from self-destructing in despair over my failure to please the three disgruntled participants.  I had never expected to be perfect, and I knew that some of their comments were based on problems to which I had contributed.  But it hurt to feel the finality of their condemnation.  They offered no charitable kindness.  I had failed them.  Completely.

I remembered one of my mentors who had been teaching math workshops for years, and I remembered reading her evaluations with her, together on an outdoor patio over sandwiches and sodas.  Every evaluation said that Candy was wonderful.  Great.  Exciting.  Thought-provoking.  Perfect.  I asked her how these compared to evaluations from all of her workshops, and she smiled.  “They’re pretty much the same, always.”  How did she do it?  How could I ever get good enough to measure up to Candy?

It didn’t seem possible that I would ever achieve teaching greatness.  Fortunately, I persevered.  Yet, even after years of proven success, I could never shake off the inner dread at the end of each workshop, as I stared at the stack of unsigned 40 evaluations on a Friday afternoon.  Had I met everyone’s need?  Had I given it my all?  Been organized?  Thoughtful?  Challenging?  Understanding?  In spite of smiles during the week, was there someone who had suffered through the week, finally getting a chance to tell me all about it on their evaluation?

Leaving Nashville, this Friday evening on the airplane, I thought about the fun, exciting, and slightly kooky week of math just finished.  The energy level had been high.  I had taught at an inner city school for a full house of 40 teachers brimming with good humor and enthusiasm for math challenges. It was fun, but I had struggled.

All week long one “Minnie Pearl” participant seemed to bubble to the surface with eccentric requests and activities.  She came late one day after the lunch break was over and spread her “picnic” sack lunch all over her group’s work table, passing around pickles and hard boiled eggs, in the midst of a lesson on multiplication.  She interrupted a fraction lesson on another day to announce that ice cream sundaes and fixin’s were being served in the back of the room.  She wore polka dots and hats with flowers.  On Wednesday, she invited me to stand down and take a seat so that she could take over and teach the division lesson a different way.  I loved her.  So did everyone else.  Fellow participants would all shake their heads, laugh and giggle, but they were laughs of understanding and acceptance.  They would never do anything to put her down.  “Minnie” was kindhearted…but what did I do to keep the workshop on track without insulting her?  How did I keep from frowning about pickles, laughing over ice cream sundaes, and staring at hats with flowers?

But the biggest challenge was the math.  Every day that week in Nashville we struggled to understand math.  Lessons I had successfully taught in earlier years and workshops seemed to devolve into confusion rather than understanding.  Teachers would ask  me to repeat instructions, go over things again, slow down, and explain it again.  At lunch there was always one table with people working through lessons and problems again, trying to write notes that would help them when they took the lessons back to their own students in September.

In spite of everything, the week was filled with smiles, encouragement, and kindness.  I will forever remember the bright ebony smile of an older woman who had been at every lunch study group of the week.  She struggled with each and every lesson during the week.  But she struggled with a smile.  On Friday afternoon, our final lesson was one that often confounded even the most sophisticated math teachers. This kind lady had good reason to be struggling this Friday.  Years earlier, in her place as a student, I had filed the activity away as one to forget.  It was too hard, and I had other things to think about.

Now, in Nashville, nearly everyone else had packed up and left, and I was chatting with people as they said final goodbyes.  Ms. Ebony remained seated with her books open, papers spread out, deep in discussion and concentration with two of her friends.  Occasionally I would hear her say, “I just don’t understand.”  Finally, after persistence, I heard a cry of elation, and she called me over.  “Look at this,” she said.  “You take this number, and this one, and this one and you add them up.  That’s how you do it.  I get it!  I can’t wait to show this to my class!  I get it!  Thank you so much!”  We were all elated.  I will always remember her as my model of what it means to be dedicated to learning and growing.  She was the ultimate “student/teacher.”

Now, on the plane, buckled into my seat, looking out over the Nashville runway, I worked to summon the courage to read 40 evaluations.  It had been a good week for me.  But, what about for them?  One after another, I read each form.  This week has been great.  The best.  I’ve learned so much.  Jane is wonderful.  Cheerful, organized, compassionate, patient, the best…JANE WALKS ON WATER!  I had spent the week teaching them, but I left the week with them teaching me.

Six years earlier I would have paid a million dollars to hold this stack of evaluations.  But in the airplane that night, reading evaluation after evaluation, I suddenly I knew how wrong I had been.

Forty evaluations.  On the papers were words that talked about Jane.  The words said wonderful things about Jane.  But I knew in my heart that these were not evaluations about me.

I could close my eyes and see the face of Minnie, Ebony, and all the rest, and I knew the truth that had eluded me all these years.  In Nashville, I walked on water because they walked on water.

They saw the best in people.  They struggled to learn when things were difficult.  They accepted with compassion the kooky interruptions of a kind lady.  They were patient with me if I wasn’t able to explain things perfectly the first time.  They took responsibility for delving into difficulties and pursuing problems to solutions.  They loved life, and they loved each other.  There was no way I was going to get an unkind evaluation.  They were the loving, patient, and compassionate people who would always see the same qualities in others.  These evaluations were not about me.  They were about the people who wrote them.

I put all 40 glowing evaluations together again in a neat pile in my lap, leaned back in my seat, closed my eyes, and reflected on each of the 40 wonderful people I had had the pleasure to come to know.  They had taught me more than I would ever be able to teach them.

I knew then that I had wasted a lifetime waiting for others to let me know how I was doing.  I basked in compliments, and I suffered under criticism, always trying to perfect myself, seeking human praise to let me know I was on the right path.  No matter how good praise felt, I had been wrong.

Yes, the evaluations of others can offer valuable information for us as we work to become the best we can be.  But only if we remember that the evaluation reflects not just our own personal value, but the world view and values of the other person.  I welcome evaluations today.

I no longer dread them..  I know that, with most people, most of the time, I succeed.  But I know much of my success is their success, too.  If there is a complaint here and there, I try to reflect on the complaint and assume my share of responsibility.  But I don’t allow the complaint to bury me.  I use what is useful to improve my teaching.  And I move on.  Complaint or praise, it’s never all about me.

On my part, oh, the words of criticism and anger I would like to retrieve from years past when I was the one wielding the pen, “evaluating” someone else!  Oh, how I cringe at what others learned about me.  Even today when I should know better, I still find myself looking at the sawdust in someone’s eye, never noticing the plank in mine.

Today, to the best of my ability, when it is my turn to evaluate someone else, I have learned to look at myself.  If I am upset at someone, what role did I play in the situation?  Am I being harsh, impatient, inflexible?  Have I tried everything positive I can think of to put things right?  And when I finally feel that I have a justifiable criticism, am I willing to express my criticism charitably with compassion for the other person, allowing them the dignity to work to rectify the situation?

When I am asked for my opinion, good or bad, I do my best to provide honest feedback.  But in the end…lastly, and most importantly…I read my comments and ask, “What kind of person would write an evaluation like this?”

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If the Speed Limit Is 65…

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IF THE SPEED LIMIT IS 65…

…WHY DO THEY MAKE CARS THAT GO 120?

I almost want to leave this chapter out of the book or make my kids promise not to read it until they are 65.  In most of the other chapters, the mistakes I tell of are mistakes of judgment that lead to hurt feelings or bad examples.  The mistake in this chapter is one that could lead to death, and I write it down for you to read only because I believe you are wiser than I ever was at 18.

My first car was a light, powder blue Volkswagen bug that wrapped around my small, 102 pound body like a boxer’s glove.  It was a basic washing machine motor with four wheels attached, and it putt-putted me everywhere.  Its only sign of luxury was a roll-back sun-roof, which quickly proved to be a rain roof with an unstoppable leak always aimed at my left eyebrow, or a windy glare-roof for the hot 110-degree Arizona sun.

None of that mattered, however, because it was mine.  It could get me everywhere, rain or shine, and the only thing that stopped me from driving off to Maine was how much gas I could buy.  Everything about my little blue bug was wonderful, even changing the oil and fixing flat tires.  I enrolled in a class to learn how to do my own tune-up and felt such control when I learned what a distributor was, how to adjust the timing, and how to replace a stolen rotor.  Zoommmm, and I was off.

In my little blue bug, I drove to Nogales on the Mexico border with my freshmen buddies, drove home from college for the holidays, ferreted through Mesa to find an apartment, checked out the malls when shopping,stopped by to see my boyfriend, and headed to the Prescott cool pine forest for my first summer job.

I was excited to be a summer camp counselor in the mountains at Camp Wamatochick where I had spent many years as a Campfire camper.  Now, as a big-person, I would be wearing the counselor necktie and sitting on Counselor Rock when the busses of children rolled in…and getting paid good money for the fun of it.

At the camp, my little blue bug stayed parked under the pine trees down the road from the horse corral, waiting for me to climb in and take off during the little bits of ‘time-off’ we were given.

I loved working at camp…the kids and the forest.  The only downer was that my boyfriend was miles down the highway in Phoenix, 80 miles away for eight weeks.  We had just met in April, sung and played guitars together, and exchanged hugs and a sweetheart ring.  Now we were apart for most of the summer.

This was exactly what my days off were meant to deal with.  Each week we counselors had one full day off, 24 hours away from camp.  For most of the eight weeks, boyfriend Vic would drive up in his ’66 Chevy pickup to share my day off.  We went camping, toured the “big” town of Prescott, and just relaxed.  Some weekends, however, I headed down to Phoenix in my little blue bug.

In order to gauge the magnitude of my mistake, you must understand a little about the road connecting Prescott to Phoenix.  Freeways were just beginning to cross the country.  Map books had little broken green lines showing the pieces of finished freeways, and these were starting to connect together huge cities :  New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Denver, and Phoenix.

In the 60’s, major roads had four lanes, two lanes going each direction, separated only by a double yellow stripe.  For the most part, however, the rest of the roads in the country were two-lane strips of pavement with a yellow stripe down the middle.

Then, just as today, construction was commonplace, but there were no extra lanes to shift the traffic off the highway.  Highway workers set out detour signs right on the highway pavement, directing traffic onto dirt paths and soft lumpy asphalt, using their orange cones and caution signs telling you to slow down.

That summer, the two-lane road from Prescott to Phoenix was under construction.  A string of orange cones led cars in both directions down a temporary, makeshift strip of bumpy blacktop, 20-feet wide, extending for miles.  The normal speed limit was 50 mph, but I’m sure that construction signs optimistically suggested many miles mph slower than that.

Times don’t change.  Just as today, back then, construction signs were meant to be ignored.  “Everyone was doing it.”  So was I.  Cars were going 50, 55, 60…fast!  My day off from camp that week was on a weekday.  With light traffic on the highway, I could pedal fast and get that blue bug reeeeeally moving.  Every few miles I pulled up behind a slow car going only 60, hang behind it for a few minutes, and pass the ‘turtle’ quickly, continuing with clear sailing for another five miles, the next turtle, and my next great sprint past…on down the highway…vroom.

I remember my Volkswagen speedometer had numbers as high as 90, and I’ll never know for sure if that engine could make 90.  But I do know that a 1970 powder blue Volkswagen on a bumpy two-lane highway under construction can go 80 miles an hour, separated from oncoming cars by tiny orange cones, and passing caution signs in a blur.  I was in a hurry.

Today I shake my head.  If I close my eyes and make vroom noises, I can still feel the shaking and wobbling of my little blue bug as it literally flew down the road.  I had only 24 hours before I had to be back at camp, and there was no time to lose.  I can only thank my Maker in heaven for protecting me on that day of lunacy.

At the time, I knew I was going too fast.  But I didn’t slow down.  Why not?  I don’t really have an answer.  I guess it’s another example of Mt. Everest…because it’s there.  There was the exhilaration of speed and excitement, the thrill of being ahead of all the ‘turtles.’  And…I was saving time.

I was in a hurry to save time.  For what?

How much of my life have I lost because I was going fast in order to save time?  That summer in Prescott, I could have literally lost my life.  I never thought it possible.  But the following year I learned that two of my high school friends had died on car rides home to Phoenix from their college at BYU in Utah.  Two 19-year-old girls and their friends.  I was stunned.  I had expected to loose touch with Carol and Denise after high school, but death was such finality.  Death belonged to bad people and old people…not to my friends.

In my senior year at high school, I had taken high school driver’s ed. and had received an A.  I had the good driver’s discount and good student discount with Allstate.  Today, my family nickname is Nervous Nelly, and it was just as true back then.  But for one day in July of 1970 in my little powder blue Volkswagen, I suspended common sense for the thrill of it and for saving time.

Life is tricky.  It can warn you about the dangers of breaking the rules…and then let you survive dangerous acts of stupidity.  Some of us get more chances than others.  I am lucky that life didn’t strike me down in my moment of dare devil speed…I deserved no better than Carol on her way back from BYU.  But life was with me.  That day.

It was also with me the night I nearly fell asleep at the wheel on my way with Victor to San Francisco.  God spared me again with the little highway bu.m.p..s that California had begun to install on the highways.  I was just going to rest my eyes for a minute, that’s all, then I’ll open them and keep going…..bump…bububububump… wow, I almost fell asleep.  Vic, can you drive? I’m tired.

Life kept Vic and me safe again in a drowning summer midnight rain, as I drove the curling narrow mountain roads through the Smoky Mountains.  Again, he was sleeping, and I was struggling to stay awake as I hurled through the wet blackness at speeds just beyond control, tires sliding into the shoulder mud and gravel at each turn.

Life is tricky.  It can teach you all the rules of safety, and then kill you just when you have the hang of it and are doing everything right.  I almost got killed three years ago, in full daylight at 4:00 p.m., driving home from work at 55 mph on the freeway, fully awake and in control.  With no warning, with no chance to think my way out of danger, the car on my right turned into my front bumper, pushing me into the car on my left, and sending me in my van wib-wob-wobbling, fish tailing down the freeway at 55 mph.  God grabbed the steering wheel with me and let me have another day to live.

I imagine that we adults are tiresome as it seems we spend half of our life telling our children to be careful.  I imagine that it seems we want them to miss the fun of life.  I imagine we seem to be afraid to even wake in the morning.  Here are the kids at 16, just looking out at all the wonderful things waiting to be experienced, places to go, people to meet, foods to eat, jobs to get, try, and quit…and then BOOM… some timid adult says CAREFUL…and there goes the fun, just like a puff of smoke.

Here it is now, truthfully on record…we were just as excited as they about life way back then…in the old days.  We weren’t so smart back then, either.  We did stupid things, and we have lived to tell our kids about them.  Over and over and over…it must seem.  Unfortunately, it doesn’t help when the kids challenge us, “Don’t worry.  Nothing’s going to happen.  You’re such a Nervous Nelly!”  Yes, life tempts us all along the way with cars that go 120 mph, even though 120 mph is the speed of death.

If any part of a book about the mistakes of life is worth anything, it’s the part that reminds me of the joys of life, the newness of it all, that even at the age of 40 there are many unexpected thrills still left for an “old person” to encounter.  Thanks, kids!  You are right to caution us adults about staying in bed, covering our heads with the blankets, and hiding from life because of fear.  You are my renewal charge of excitement for life, savoring each precious moment that I might squeeze from every day, living it with exuberance and joy.

As a small payment to you, my children, for restoring my joy in living, I give to you my tiny caution, still there, but in a very small voice of uncertainty.  Life gives no guarantee.  The only view of the future we humans have is our hope in possibilities and our limited power to explore them.  I pray that my own children will have enough joy and pleasure in exploring life that they will treasure it beyond measure, guarding it as often as possible against any of the ‘stupid’ decisions we humans are so prone to make.  No fear,  but life.  Life with caution, but most of all, life with JOY!

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I Am a Rock, I Am an Island…

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I AM A ROCK, I AM AN ISLAND…

…NO MAN IS AN ISLAND

My two children accuse me at times of being too soft, too sentimental, too sensitive.  My standard answer is, “You’re right.  I’m a sensitive person.  Be careful with me.”  This wasn’t always true.  I used to be a rock.

My parents raised my sister and me to be independent thinkers, problem solvers, think-for-yourself kind of people.  This served me well at Arcadia High School.

In my junior year at Arcadia, I had felt honored and excited when invitations arrived in my first hour classroom singling out the “special ones” to join Delta – the Club of Special Ones.  A Delta Girl entered our classroom with envelopes in her hand, handed one to the teacher, and turned to walk out of the room.  All eyes in the room stayed glued on “the envelope.”  As the door closed behind the “special one”, the teacher looked to her hand and called my name.

I couldn’t wait for next year and the club meetings, to stay late and be one of the group, the Delta group.

My senior year arrived, and in September, I went to the first meeting. I grabbed one of the seats on the perimeter of the room and watched to see what would happen.  Today, I can’t remember anything of those meetings other than the feeling that I didn’t belong.  Some of the Delta girls who were friends of mine during my junior year had graduated, and as a senior, I felt isolated in a club of girls from the year below, my year, girls who were dating football stars and comparing clothes and dates.

Likewise, they didn’t seem to feel comfortable around me.  I didn’t see any sense in pressing it.  I was a rock.  After trying Delta for five meetings, I simply told President Donna I didn’t feel like continuing in the club.  She didn’t ask me to stay.  I never looked back.  I didn’t miss them, and they didn’t miss me.  I was a rock.

That experience told me I didn’t need to go early to college freshman orientation at Arizona State University in order to participate in Rush…sororities…sisters…and family.

What a week of frenzy–where all the campus sororities invited all the freshman women to 15-minute parties where you hurried to chat cleverly and quickly with a variety of “Delta” women so they would remember you when they sat with all the “Delta” sisters later in the evening, going over the lists of freshmen women who had come through the parties at their sorority house that day.

Their evening job would be to cross off the “dull” women.  Slowly but surely, party after party, day after day, until finally, on day number four,  they would issue their premium invitations to the select group of women who were invited to become college “Delta” girls.

My aunt Marla had belonged to a sorority when she was in college.  She had fond memories of it. In the quite days of summer before going to the university campus, talking with me about my plans for entering college, she asked me if I would be going to Rush. I tried to soften my distaste for sororities, even as she told me  about her best friends, her sorority friends.  Finally, I was pressed to explain my prejudices that were based on my few weeks of membership in Delta.  Aunt Marla accused me of being narrow minded.  So I showed her.

I went to Rush at the University.  Monday, with the list of sorority parties in hand, I made the rounds.  One day of triviality was enough.  On Tuesday, I dropped out, leaving me with a week to explore the campus.  I was a rock.  One of my best friends today was also a Rush dropout, another rock.

I had no reason to apologize to Aunt Marla.  The dominant memory of Rush forms one of my most vivid and worst memories of college.

But there were other girls, other dreams, and other hearts at play in that university introduction.  A dear, quiet Jewish girl had been sent to Rush by her mother to pledge to her mother’s Jewish sorority.  As happened with all ‘rushies,’ her party invitations decreased day by day as sororities crafted their final lists of invitees to pledge.

On the final day of Rush I found her in tears, alone in our room, wondering how she was ever going to tell her mother that she hadn’t pledged her Jewish sorority.  She had been crossed off everyone’s list.  She was alone, the rush girl that nobody had invited, even to her mother’s Jewish sorority, breaking an almost mandatory mother-daughter tradition.  She agonized.  What was she going to say to her Mother?

There was no way to console her, nothing to be said to take away the pain.  I cried inside for her and wished she were a rock, too.  Who needed them?  It was all silliness…unless you wanted to be part of the silliness.  And she did.  I hated Rush.

The rest of college suited me to a T.  Being independent and on my own as a college freshman was a high I have never since experienced.  My parents were wonderful to pay for me live in a dorm on campus, a few miles from the family home.  I asked them to let me stay full time on campus, not coming home on weekends, so that I could feel as if I had gone to an out-of-state college.  I would “fly” home in my powder-blue VW for Thanksgiving and Christmas, six miles away.  They respected my request to be a Rock.

Not everyone did.  I was shocked when several men friends trivialized my arrival at college by saying I was there simply to get my M-R-S degree.  ‘What kind of degree is that?’ I asked, sincerely wondering what field of study it came from.  ‘Mrs.’ they said.  ‘Get it?’  I did, and I was insulted.  Who needed men?  I didn’t.  I was a Rock.

America is a great place to be a Rock.  We can get lost in crowds, in cities, on computers.  We can demand our rights, our space, our distance.  But eventually, even rocks must melt.

Arizona is the perfect state of the nation to prove it so.  Given enough time, enough rain, enough sunshine, and enough snow, all rocks wear down.  Rocks break down into tiny rocks.  They crack and break into sand.  Rocks, huge boulders, fall off mountainsides.  They are washed down rivers.  They are chiseled and dynamited.  And if enough forces join together, rocks can be so ravaged, so digested, so pounded…that they end up at the bottom of the Grand Canyon…a hole where rocks are no more.

Somewhere, someplace, at some unknown time, I gave up my life as a rock.  I’m glad.  I was reborn a plant, an animal, a soft thing, a thing that bruises, hurts, cries…and smiles.  Be careful with me.  I am sensitive, I feel pain, I can be hurt.

Rock or plant?  I choose to be soft, to be open to hurt.  Rocks don’t last.  At least I will have the fun of feeling a caress, a smile, a hug.  As a plant, I can feel it all, the good and the bad.  Of course, I prefer the good.

Be careful with me.  Yes, you can hurt me.  I hope you don’t, but the best I can do is to work on not hurting you.  In the end, the rocks and the plants, we are all going to the same place.  I just prefer being able to smile and share with others the enjoyment of the journey.
 

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What a Cute Picture…

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WHAT A CUTE PICTURE…

…WHEN DID WE TAKE IT?

When I quit teaching to spend more time at home with both of my kids and husband, I looked forward to the pleasures of quiet time, having leisure time to enjoy simple pleasures.

One of the first projects I wanted to undertake was putting piles of photographs into empty albums set aside in the corner of the office.  I was excited to finally have time to go through photographs, putting them into the pages while recalling the fun we had had as Jamie and Justin were growing up.

I grabbed the first set of pictures on the top.  I looked down at the photo in my hand…a picture of Jamie when she was ten years old.  Without warning, tears welled up in my eyes.

For the picture of Jamie in my hand, we had set our camera to a shutter speed faster than anyone can see, 1/500th of a second.  It ensured clear, sharp pictures without the blurring that happens when people are moving.  Sure enough.  This picture was sharp and clear.  And the girl in the photo was precious…darling.  But tears started fall into my lap as I realized that I had no memory of that day.  I had no memory of being with the precious little girl in the photograph, one of the most important people in my life.

What was I going to do with the rest of the photos in the stack?  Of course, they had to be filed away.  I would not be able to destroy family photos.  But what was the point?  What was I going to do with a photo album filled with photos that didn’t bring back memories?  How will I describe those pictures to my grandchildren 20 years in the future?

With the stack of photos in my hand, I realized that, like the black hole in outer space, my life had a major black hole of ten years that had fallen out of sight.  Closing my eyes and trying to pull up memories from those years, I could only see myself sitting at the office desk late at night, tired, eyes drooping, grading spelling papers and editing student paragraphs.

I saw myself waking ten minutes before the 5:00 a.m. alarm clock every morning, dressing in the still, quiet house, eating toast with a cup of tea, and pulling out of the driveway by 6:30, one hour before everyone else in the house would wake.  I remembered Friday nights, dragging my bag of papers to be graded into the house, putting my feet up on the coffee table, telling the family to call out for Pizza while I sat numb with exhaustion.

One thing was certain.  There would be no pictures of family times, picnics, camping trips, hikes, or trips to Disneyland during those ten years.  There hadn’t been time.  I had filled our weekends with workshops, house cleaning, laundry, groceries, lesson plans, bulletin boards, and on and on, fitting just enough time with family into the schedule to keep track of music lessons and who had a band concert the next week.

Somehow, during those ten years my children grew up around me, but without me.  Now I was holding pictures of them, but with no memory of where and why they had been taken.  Instead, I sat recollecting memories of where I had been going and why–but memories without Jamie and Justin.

I couldn’t figure out how this had happened so easily and unexpectedly.  Of all my life’s accomplishments, I took most pride in my ability to organize time efficiently.  I could measure the time needed for nearly anything, slipping in and out of meetings, classes, and conferences with barely one or two “wasted minutes” on either side of the appointment.  I learned to carry books with me to read while waiting in line.  My school bag was always at my side with student papers to grade, one pencil, a blue pen, and a black pen.

Like most teachers, I had learned to stack time, like three dimensional tic-tac-toe.  I could grade a science test while planning dinner in my head, listening to the kids talk with each other, and waiting for the doctor to call us.  I could load the washing machine while yelling down the hall for Justin to do his chores in the middle of a conversation with Dad about what time my airplane was leaving next week, and thinking about the materials I needed to bring home from school to carry with me on the trip.  No moment wasted.

Ten years of organized efficiency, conservation of time, and I found myself sitting on the floor with pictures of lost moments.  I remembered back three years to the night my father died.  In that split second, I realized how many questions I suddenly wanted to ask him, now that he was gone.  I would never know why he started making marmalade.  I will never be able to ask him where in the desert he planted the devil’s claw plants he needed for making Indian baskets.  Did he really put the dormer windows in the cabin just for me?  I will never know what he was most thankful for in his life.  I had never taken the time to ask him.  When the questions finally came to mind, he was no longer here.

I put the picture of Jamie back on the top of the stack of photos and set them on the shelf again where they had lain for the past two years.  I couldn’t bear seeing a flood of unrecognized photos today.  There no longer seemed to be any hurry to be organized.

Since that day…the day of the lost memories…I have been able to go back and read through journals I kept.  Page after page contains the words, we have been so busy, lately.  Busy, busy, life is hectic, I can’t wait to rest, I’ve gotten a lot accomplished today, busy, it sure will be nice to rest.  I was shocked as these words became repetitive reminders of how unimportant busy seemed to be to me now…years of memories of time with two dear children now lost to me because I had managed to be so efficient.

My own mother had been right all those years.  “Slow down, Jane.  You’re trying to do too many things.  Take it easy.”  I offered her excuse after excuse, a string of I can’ts.  She knew the truth.  I can’ts were simply I didn’ts.  She was truly right.

With all of our scientific cleverness, have we really improved upon the Indian method of recounting history and time related to the seasons or to the year of the great blizzard?  Do we really know time better simply because we have created scientifically precise methods of measuring and manipulating it?

How do we know the value of one second if we don’t turn our back to the clock, close our eyes, and feel it?  What does it matter that we can count billionths of seconds, if we can’t remember them?  Just what does the value of a second mean to us if we don’t throw the clock away, lock eyes with a loved one, and live it?

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Natural Childbirth

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Published September 4, 2006

Those of us in the boomer generation have lived through a time of great human experimentation.  It has focused on the foundational definition of life itself, with stunning implications for our children and grandchildren.  We stand on the brink of the brave new world we read about in high school English.  And we have a solemn duty.  We must bear witness to the changes we have made to a thread of life that will trail behind as we leave this earth.

Once upon a time, a man and a woman fell in love.  They committed to a lifetime together and gave birth to children.  As each baby grew in the womb, local wives tales served to predict whether the child was a boy or a girl.  In the end, couples went to the delivery room with one prayer, “Let our baby be healthy.”

Today, babies are ordered up according to specifications, like picking out a Beanie Baby off the shelf, ready made.  The variations on designing babies is endless:

  • In 2002, the story broke about a lesbian couple, both of them deaf, who chose to create a deaf baby.  Their son Gauvin was the second deaf child fathered for them by a sperm donor with five generations of deafness in his family.
  • Recent debate has focused on whether technology should be used to eliminate congenital diseases or disabilities. Many disability and gay organizations have felt threatened by the concept of pursuing “perfect” children.
  • In Britain, the legal barriers preventing a couple from creating a designer baby to help save the life of an existing sick child were eliminated in 2001.  Pre-implantation genetic diagnosis on embryos not only promises a baby free of certain identifiable diseases, but also allows “embryo selection” to determine the sex of a baby.
  • Chinese demographers warn that the nation’s social fabric could unravel based on sex selection that eliminates girl babies.  Figures published in Chinese media reveal 116.86 boys are born for every 100 girls in China. Since the 1970s, when China instituted its strict birth control policy, couples have sought ways to guarantee a son.
  • Sex selection in India and China is achieved chiefly through ultrasound scans followed by the selective abortion of female fetuses. In the United States, the Genetics and IVF (GIVF) Institute in Fairfax, Virginia, is pioneering preconception sex selection by means of a system that segregates sperm that will produce girls from those that will produce boys.
  • In England, Jamie Whitaker was designed by and born to his parents for the purpose of providing a genetic match to four-year-old brother Charlie who suffers from leukemia. Called “test tube baby treatment”, Jamie’s father defends the process by saying he didn’t select his baby for insignificant reasons like color of eyes or sex.  The Whitaker’s doctor Mohammad Taranissi says he is aware of dozens of other couples who want to undergo this same procedure.
  • Faced with high rates of infertility and a declining number of infants available for adoption, infertility treatment has become big business in the United States.  “Success” at producing pregnancies has given rise to the “problem” of increasing multiple births.  Twin births have risen 52% and triplet and greater births have quadrupled since 1980.  Multiple births increased by nearly 400% for women in their 30s and by more than 1,000% for women in their 40s.
  • In 2004, researchers in South Korea created 30 cloned embryos that grew to about 100 cells in size – further than any verified experiment so far. This meant they were able to harvest embryonic stem cells from one of the embryos. Internationally, scientists expressed concern that maverick scientists learning from this experiment will soon attempt to clone a baby. For the South Korean experiments, scientists used 242 eggs donated from 16 healthy women.
  • In 2005, the key South Korean doctor admitted to paying these women for “egg retrieval” in violation of ethical assurances the eggs had been donated.  Bioethicists warn of the dangers such payments pose for coercing poor women into risky medical procedures.
  • Insurance companies are coming closer to dictating gene profiling of unborn babies.  Many anticipate a day when insurance carriers will enforce abortion on parents with a “choose or lose” policy that refuses medical coverage for babies born with problems diagnosed in the womb.

With so much recent attention on creating babies, we must remember this is all taking place at the same time we are aborting over 1.2 million babies each year in the United States.  The reason?  No room at the inn…we can’t find a way to make a place for these babies in our lives.

Two thousand years have passed since the birth of the baby in the manger.  In the past forty years we have prided ourselves on modern progress.  We are busy manufacturing a world to leave our children, where babies are products of human design that can be destroyed like all products when they fail to meet manufacturer specifications.

It seems particularly important this year to look up at the sky and wonder at the majesty of babies created by the great Creator.  If we are dissatisfied with His grand design, how can we feel any greater satisfaction at our own handiwork?

Perhaps we would be better off accepting all babies that arrive at the doorstep, giving praise for their blessing to our lives, opening the door, and making one more bed in the inn.

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First published at From the Home Front as “Natural Child Birth” on December 5, 2005.

GOWYL

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Published May 8, 2006

They offer advice to people in pain.  On the surface, their advice sounds forward-looking, pragmatic, and helpful:  Get On With Your Live…GOWYL.

Psychologists and counselors are dealing with a problem that many in America consider inevitable…divorce.  “We think of a marriage as a crap shoot, with worse than 50-50 odds of finding and marrying ‘the right person,’” writes Diane Sollee of Smart Marriages.  “If we marry ‘the wrong person’, we want the right to exit and try again.”  GOWYL.

It’s hard to imagine a family that hasn’t been touched by divorce today.  The method preferred by social scientists in determining the divorce rate is to calculate how many people who have ever married subsequently divorced. Counted that way, the rate has never exceeded about 41 percent, researchers say.  Rising radically in the 1960s, since the 1970s, the rate has steadily been inching downward.

Still, even as divorce rates decline, the number of lives impacted is staggering.  In 2003, based on the 45 reporting states (excluding CA, HI, IN, LA, OK), 920,060 marriages were dissolved.  Over 1.8 million men and women will have to GOWYL.

Richard Cohen, Washington Post critic-at-large, speaks for the frustrated majority.  Conceding the damage divorce does to children, he demands that those who preach family values finally come clean and admit there are no solutions.  GOWYL

As Cohen and so many see it, we are stuck.  There is no way out.  Without divorce, we are asking people to choose between their own happiness and the happiness and well-being of their children.
”[As] much as we hate the fallout, we’ve become convinced that divorce is inevitable — one of life’s necessary evils,” says Sollee.  “This is due to our attitudes about marriage. And, we want to preserve this right for our fellow citizens. No one, we have come to believe, should have to live in an unhappy marriage.”

 

Stuck in the negative, and pushed to accept the inevitable, America has developed an extensive support system designed to make divorce easier and happier.  Divorces are no-fault.  Property is divided.  Child support payments are calculated, if not paid.  And life goes on.  Make the best of it.  GOWYL

But wait.  Yes, wait!

We have been encouraged to accept failure as a way of life.  And we have created several divorce industries…lawyers and counselors…generating millions of dollars for people who profit from the failure of others.  It doesn’t have to be that way.  Failure is not inevitable.

As it turns out, we don’t have to choose to be miserable in marriage to make our children happy.  The real data on happy and unhappy marriages tells a very different story.

When you look at a nationally representative sample of married people who say they are “very unhappy” in their marriages, and follow them over time, 60 percent of those who stick it out (about 15 percent do not) say they are “quite happy” or “very happy” in their marriages five years later. Another 25 percent of couples report improvement in their marital happiness.

These couples did GOWYL.  But they did it by staying married.  They were once unhappy.  And, without the help and assistance of divorce attorneys and counselors paving the way, sticking with their marriages, they were able to create a happy marriage once again…not just for the sake of their kids, but for the sake of themselves.

That’s right.  Unhappy couples aren’t doomed to a life of personal misery in their stoic, chin-up choice to stay together for the kids’ sake.   They can actually recover, restore and reconnect.

If these couples can do it, why can’t other couples do it?  And if they can do it, then how?

As sociologists and politicians since the 60s worked to normalize and even elevate the deconstruction of the traditional family, these questions were considered regressive.  Divorce was the solution.  Marriage was the problem.

Today, as we measure the pain and cost of divorce, these questions offer a long-overdue hope to people everywhere.  They create a new focus for GOWYL.  Marriage is the solution.  Divorce is the problem.

Life is more than just matter of getting on with it.  It’s a matter of where we are getting on to and what life will be when we get there.  If you’re headed toward a solution, a happy marriage is still a wonderful destination.

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First published at From the Home Front as “GOWYL” on May 1, 2006.

 

Still Golden After All These Years

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Published May 1, 2006

Do unto others…unto others?  Is it a poem?  Shakespeare?

I shudder with a mixture of dread and curiosity every time Jay takes to the street with his camera crew and a microphone in hand.  In a regular feature Jaywalking, Leno approaches people on a Hollywood street to survey their knowledge on current news or a particular topic.

One night it’s history.  Leno asks passersby how many judges there are on the Supreme Court.  A young man laughs, shrugs his shoulders and tosses a number in the air.  Thirty six?  Leno laughs, too.  So, he asks, did you go to college?  Yeah, the man replies.  I graduated last year.

The Golden Rule?  It’s a mathematical formula, isn’t it?

In a variation on his regular theme, Leno one night lets people choose their questions from either a 4th, 6th, or 8th grade text.  Jen, a registered dental assistant, says the Grand Canyon is 3200 miles long, and an Alabama State student says Columbus discovered America in 1842.  What country did we fight in the Revolutionary War, Jay asks Selena.  Oh, my gosh.  I don’t know this stuff, she admits.  I really don’t know this stuff.  Keeping a straight face, Leno tells her, I believe you

Another night, and another question…laughter gives way to sadness as we witness the current state of affairs in modern American life.  What is the Golden Rule, Jay asks.  One after another, each person stares at him with a blank face.  You know, he persists.  The Golden Rule…do unto others…?  That’s enough to get them started.

The Golden Rule?  Do unto others…before they do it to you.  Yeah, that’s it.

 The ethic of reciprocity is a general moral principle found in virtually all religions, often as a fundamental rule. It is most commonly heard as “do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”  This traditional rule is so highly valued that it has been known in English for centuries as the “Golden Rule”.

How did we manage in America to loose sight of the Golden Rule?  Why is it impossible for these regular people to immediately recite the simple statement for Jay?  How can we possibly teach our children new attitudes of respect and love when we have lost sight of a common cultural law as basic as the Golden Rule?

So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets. [Mat 7:12]  A nation that does not have this law written on its heart is a nation that has forgotten how to love.

As I would have them do unto me?  Would I have them yell at me and trash me with vulgarity and accusations on Jerry Springer’s show?  Certainly not.

Would I have a dear family member meet me center stage on a national television talk show to reveal a devastating “secret,” entertaining the world at the expense of my humiliation?  Of course, I wouldn’t.

What part of letting my friends get drunk on Spring Break is a measure of my love for them?  Not one bit of it.

Restoring a healthy expression of love to our nation is as simple as remembering one rule, golden in value:

Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?” Jesus replied: ” ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’  All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments. [Mat 22:36-40]

As we take up the great commandment and make it the watchword for our life, it is exceedingly clear how much of modern life encourages us to focus on what is good for ourselves regardless of how it impacts others.

The Golden Rule is the narrow path.  It is the touchstone, the measuring stick, the weight and measure for all we say, do and think.  It is not merely a “good idea.”  It is the law.  It is a commandment.  It is the sight we must fix our eyes upon, the bandage for our spirit, and the balm for a hurting world.

Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

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First published at From the Home Front as “Still Golden After All These Years,” on April 10, 2006.