Christmas Ruminations

Little toy trains, little toy tracks

Little toy drums, coming from a sack

Carried by a man, dressed in white and red

Little one, don't you think it's time you were in bed?

The great Roger Miller wrote the words, Raffi sang the song my kids grew up with.  I was listening to The Prince of Frogtown by Rick Bragg, who was also, to my great fortune, the reader.  He was describing a scene around Christmastime, as he was wrapping presents and unconsciously singing to himself those words that his step-son, "the boy," overheard.  His wife told him the boy was in the next room grinning ear to ear because he thought Rick was singing to him.

When I planned my December week in Florida, I chose a Christmas novel on audio for the car, as well as the many print holiday novels that I was planning on reading at the resort.  I also finally learned to make a playlist on iTunes, and titled it, "Christmas."  The whole inspiration for that being that I wanted to hear Raffi sing "Little Toy Trains" on the drive.

I didn't like Raffi much when I first heard of him.  It was a video given to my baby daughter by her Aunt Jennie.  There were instructions that came with the video.  Raffi, it seemed, did not want kids going to his concerts until they knew the words to his songs.  Well, really, I huffed, what a tyrant.  But in fact I am that parent that teaches my kids the words before they go to a concert, not so they would behave, but because I love to sing, and I loved to sing with them.  And over their childhood years, I came to love Raffi.  Like me, he doesn't have much of a voice, although he does tend to hit the right notes more often than I do.  But like me, what he lacks in vocal depth he makes up for in earnestness.  Turns out he's the uncle that kids like to sing along with.  So Raffi's Christmas Album, along with Raffi's Christmas Treasury were staples at our house, and are still treasured reminders of my Christmases with my kids.

All my Christmases haven't been great, but over my 64 years of Christmas, I have had some very fine moments.  Even in my childhood home, I remember with happiness the trees, going from live to shiny silver fakes over the years.  Though arguments, derision and tension played too much a part of the holiday, I still remember the excitement of Christmas morning, the bells that my father would ring, calling, "Ho ho ho, Merry Christmas" in his deep, broken English (I have those bells, or ones just like them, and I carried on the tradition.  The bells remain in my night table drawer, and I hope to pass them on to one of my kids for their kids.)

I remember the bride dolls sent by family in Sardinia, so beautiful that my father decided that to prevent my sister and I from ruining them, he would keep them stored in their boxes in our attic.  And he would bring them out every now and then and let us look at them.  I'm not sure, but I think he eventually broke down and let us have them and we in turn ruined them.  I'm just guessing; my sister has a better memory for the details of my family history than I.

I remember the bride dolls from Christmas when I was little. When I was a pre-teen there was a hi-fi under the tree for me.  A hi-fi, but Santa hadn't thought to bring records, so my father took me to a record store where I bought five singles, and then when I went grocery shopping with my mother she would sometimes let me buy an LP from what was a very odd assortment of sale records.  I drove my parents crazy with that hi-fi, and when I got to be an actual teen, and we progressed to actual war, at some point my father took the hi-fi downstairs, so that I could no longer listen to it in my room.  Some nights, after dark, and everyone in bed, I would creep downstairs and listen, in the dark and very quietly, to "The Sounds of Silence."  But that is another story.

My point is that Christmas with all its human failings, was a wonderful holiday.

When I got older and got a car, I spent Christmas Eve night at my best friend Arlene's.  The drinking age back then was 18 and I had started drinking with gusto around then.  Arlene's dad, Fred, made me my first Manhattan -- his drink of choice -- and then quite a few more.  They were a warm family that took me in at a time when I needed a warm and loving family.  To this day I only want Manhattans during Christmas season, and they always taste like Christmas, and I always make a toast to Fred who cared about me when my own father did not.

I believe it was when I moved to Maryland, when I was 26, that I began to host Christmas tree trimming parties.  The first one was a lonely affair, the timing was wrong and no one came.  But they grew into happy events with good friends, some new each year, and left me with ornaments (including a series of Peanuts balls that were marked with the year)...

...as well as memories.  My favorite memory was the year I had a small apartment in Baltimore, with a tree that was badly anchored, and a candle on the table next to one of my then traditional brandy soaked fruitcakes.  The story goes -- and I have it in writing somewhere -- that either the tree or rambunctious celebrating caused the candle to tip into the fruitcake which lit up festively.  My friends Christine, from whom I have sadly lost touch, or Susan, with whom I have recently reconnected, could tell you better the details.

When I had my own kids, Christmas exploded.  I began shopping on December 26th for the following year, and started baking cookies well before Thanksgiving.  We made gingerbread together, once I learned the best recipe in my son's first grade class, and made gingerbread boys and girls and trees and stockings, all decorated to within an inch of their existence.  I had also been making gingerbread houses since I discovered the pattern and recipe in The Foods of the World Cookbook:  Germany, but only every few years.  Because it took that long for me to forget what a pain in the ass it was and look forward to making it again.

Mine really looked like this -- once.

Our trees were big and beautiful, and each year I bought at least one new special ornament.  Harps and horns, angels and nutcracker soldiers, bells and icicles, doves and... lobsters.  And of course little toy trains and little toy drums.  I learned to make salt dough ornaments and gave away dozens and hung dozens more.  It was a production that grew larger every year.

We went to visit Santa each year, of course.  One year my daughter brought her list to Santa at the Saint James General Store.  He took the list and pored over it as though he had never seen anything like it.

Santa was in the shed around back.

Another year we met Santa at the Stony Brook Post Office, and he was again delighted to see my children.  I have a photo collage of all the different years of Santa and my kids.  This year I urged my daughter to take the collage home with her, and some of the decorations.  It was my idea, as it is time for her to begin her own family Christmases, but yet there was a small pain in my heart when she took them.

Now I celebrate Christmas quietly, reading Christmas themed books and sometimes listening to my Christmas music.  Lately my son has been coming once a year for a few days at Christmas.  I'm glad to see him, but it takes us a few days to be comfortable with each other, so it is a bittersweet visit.

I love Christmas.  I love it as much because of its winter solstice origins as the Christian myth.  I believe Christmas is the powerful holiday it is because the joy and hope of celebrating the days getting longer merged with the myth of everlasting life.  That candy canes and bearded men with bags of gifts share the holiday with choirs and, yes, Jesus.  That is what makes Christmas such a very full holiday.

If you look around America, you can't hardly swing a dead cat without hitting a Christmas symbol, or walk into any store without hearing Christmas music.  It starts too early, saturating our existence and, sadly, it has to do mostly with making money.  But even so, lights and songs and reindeer make it hard to forget what season it is.  So I wonder about people who rant about having Christmas taken away from them.  After all, if you own the spirit of Christmas, it can't be taken away from you, and the signs are pretty strong that nobody's going to be taking away the symbols.

In fact, a lot of those who are not religious, like myself, still love the holiday, its symbols and its meaning.  But it is tainted these days not just with the manipulations of capitalist greed but with the rage and jealousy of those who claim to be its defenders.

These days there is a self-consciousness about Christmas that causes some to make the greeting sound more like a challenge.  And others to be afraid to extend it.  And the recipients to sometimes wonder if it is intended as a dismissal of their own beliefs.

But life is too short to waste overanalyzing a holiday season that means so much.  The joy of Christmas is certainly in the story of a baby's birth, in the world's celebrating an event that might have been so common.  It is not really the "king of the world" business for me, but the way all creatures from kings to sheep to other children, stop to honor a baby's birth.  But it is also the pleasure of celebrating friends and family, the giving of gifts, the sharing of wonderful food, the singing of songs, that makes this time of year so wonderful.  

So I decided to stop worrying about how to greet people, and how they greet me.  Wish me a Merry Christmas if you like.  I love Christmas.  I also love the spirit of St. Patrick's Day parades and parties, of chocolate rabbits and Easter Eggs.  I don't think too much about serious holidays, although I wish they hadn't become an excuse for "holiday sales" and messages of faux patriotism by politicians.  Thanksgiving was once thought of as the only holiday that hadn't been commercialized, and now Walmart employees have to go to work not just at the crack of dawn on Friday, but on Thanksgiving as well.  The Macy's parade is an excuse for Christmas advertisements that has become more blatant every year.  But for now, at least, stores are mostly closed on Christmas Day, and our merchants have kept the after-Christmas sales to after Christmas.  

Over the years I have made my own Christmas, as most of us that celebrate it do.  It fills my heart.  I hope this December you fill your heart with your own holiday, and whatever special it means to you. 

  

In Each Moment

I have been lately looking around and considering where I am.

The other day, for instance, I stopped and looked around my double-wide.  For as long as I can remember I had wanted a house with a library.  Well, I don't have a "library."  My entire house is pretty much a library, with bookshelves filled in every room, and in some cases, books just stacked on tables and floors.  The books have meaning for me; in some ways they represent my entire life.  I realized that I have the library I always wanted.  The thought surprised me, and made me feel content.

When I moved to Charleston some seventeen years ago, just me and my kids, I was on my own, and that was okay.  In that first year, a nice guy was doing work around my house, and I asked if he wanted a slice of the pizza I had just made for dinner.  He said no thanks, it was the night of his monthly dinner meeting with friends.  I felt a bit sad at that.  I liked eating out, and I missed friends.

But somewhere along the way, I found friends, and we have so much in common.  I now have more lunches and dinners with friends than I probably should.  We have books in common so that I am always being led to another story, another idea, and they will always allow me to tell them about the book I have just read that they would love.  And we share values, both Democratic and democratic, so that my work, now that I am retired, has a sense of purpose and fulfillment, and of community.  And we have laughs, which is as important to me as anything.

My kids are gone now, and that transition has been tough.  But they are doing great things, and even though I may feel more insecure about where I am in their lives than anything else, I am learning to just take pleasure in our relationship, because they both give me great pleasure.

My husband's death, a year ago, was a loss that also led to finding a piece of a puzzle that had been eluding and frightening me all my life.  As I looked around at people who would inevitably die, and wondered at how to accept the fact of my own death, I began to live differently.  Instead of thinking about where I would be in x-number of years, I think about what a day it is today.  The hardest thing about death I think is imagining life going on without me.  But when I die, so does that consciousness.  That makes the present moment the more valuable.

So here I am as Thanksgiving approaches, a very different time for me than it was a year ago.  I am feeling a wholeness I hadn't felt until this year.  And while I know there will be struggle, frustration and sadness, and there are moments when the thought of dying takes my breath away, I know I will get through it and on to that place of contentment again.

Love Has Nothing to Do with It

In my short career as a Master Gardener, before the southern clime killed my once-green thumb, I learned that not everything we call "bugs" is a bug.  Apparently some are not bugs but are "insects" or "arachnids" but Dictionary.com has assured me that it's okay for plain old folks like us to just say "bugs."  Although I prefer to call them "damned bugs."

You can tell it's spring because on the very first and most beautiful days the gnats come out to enjoy the weather.  I bought my house in April sixteen years ago, and around 5:00 p.m. I stopped to make a call at a pay phone (yes it was that long ago), and I was viciously attacked by thousands of gnats.  All y'all know what that feels like.  I had never experienced anything like that, but I had already had the closing on the house and my fate was sealed.

The thing about gnats, though, and now I can say it with a number of years' experience, is actually two things:  1) when they attack they actually are doing something to you that has to do with their survival, and 2) Avon Skin-So-Soft.

The April of my second year I was having a deck built for my pool.  It was early evening and there were a bunch of pretty sturdy guys outside hammering away.  Then there was a knock on my door.  The contractor, a big, sturdy guy, wanted to know if I by any chance had some Skin-So-Soft that he and his workers could use.  They were being driven to absolute distraction by the gnats.  Sadly, I had none, but that was how I learned of the survival effects of that amazing Avon product.

Avon, by the way, has preferred to miss out on the greatest money-making ad campaign ever by not advertising that it keeps gnats away.  I don't understand it myself, because I would be much more likely to spend too much money for skin cream that has been proven for decades to keep away gnats than for one that just keeps my skin moist and sweet smelling.

And another thing about Avon Skin-So-Soft is that, up until a few years ago, it had a scent that took me back to my childhood when my very own mother used it up in Rhode Island.  So, for me, Skin-So-Soft has been a win-win.  Not to mention a victory against gnats.

But let's proceed with the spring bug procession.  At some point fairly early the days get really hot.  This is when even gnats are smart enough to go to wherever they were before the nice weather arrived.  This is when the really stupid bugs come out.  No, I'm not talking about beetles, although they are right up there when it comes to stupidity.  I'm talking about what we here in the South call "love-bugs."

Like gnats, they annoy us in both spring and fall, and in opposite order:  in the fall, the love-bugs come out around September, and then when the weather gets really fine, they go away and the gnats come out.  I don't call them love-bugs, and I'll tell you why.

The first time I saw them (I had left in April after the house closing and returned at the end of June for good so I missed the spring infestation.) was in September.  I had dropped the kids off at school and, back home, walked to the back of my back yard, to what I had proudly come to think of as "my pond".  There I encountered the weirdest creatures I had ever seen, bugs that were attached to each other in pairs, flying around in a drunken, Woodstock-like manner and for no apparent reason, landing on me.

My neighbor came over for a visit, and she laughed when I asked her what the hell was going on.  "Those are love bugs."

Really?  Really???

These are the absolute ickiest bugs I have ever dealt with.  They spend about 24 hours stuck to each other before they die.  Their whole entire purpose is to procreate, although describing it as procreation is just too polite for what they do.  The smaller of the two is the male, and at times you will see some really pathetic single males with their teeny tiny penises curled and ready to spring into action, if only they can find a female.  These creatures do not eat, they only live to spawn.  In the morning, as the day heats up, I have had to leave my favorite reading spot on my porch to hide inside, because the hundreds of pairs of these dirty things constantly landing on me was too disgusting to tolerate.  And apparently, Wadmalaw Island is one of the favorite honeymoon spots for love-bugs.

So let me continue the story of my first love-bug season of my first year on Wadmalaw Island, South Carolina.

After my encounter at the pond, the invasion got worse.  And worse again.  Possibly the winds were blowing them up from their homeland of Florida.  It was the year of Hurricane Floyd, which did just enough damage to cut the electricity for several days.  There I was, standing on a chair trying to clean all the litter from the oaks (I prefer to call them "damned oaks") while those stupid bugs came flying into me and just sticking there.  Which, by the way, they are easy to swat because, unlike flies, they don't have the good sense to move when threatened, but they are also full of what I like to call "goo."  You know, because of what they are doing.

Too many weeks went by, and the love bugs were thick and stupid.  Thick in the sense of so many that I read in the Post and Courier that social engagements in the Lowcountry, from oyster roasts to wedding receptions, were being canceled or moved indoors because, well, you can just imagine....  Thick in the sense that they gummed up car engines and destroyed paint jobs...

not to mention made visibility near impossible.  This happens because not only do they love heat, but they find the heat of gas fumes even more irresistible.  Which made mowing the lawn one of the more excruciating outdoor activities of the season.

And, finally, they were thick in the sense of when they swarmed onto the porch in the heat of the day, they tended to die there, leaving a quarter of an inch of dead bug to sweep up, daily.

I wish I could say I was exaggerating.  Fortunately, there has only been one other infestation nearly as bad in my time here.  I like to think that the colder winters are wiping them out.  It could be their own stupidity, but they seem to be doing just fine in Florida.

I decided to write this post because, to my astonishment, there are people who live a mere twenty miles from me who have not experienced the bizarre love-bug event.  In fact, a friend told me last week that she had seen pictures, but never encountered a love-bug in reality.

It seems that, as with gnats, if you live here you just ought to have that experience.

Wikipedia notes that they are also called honeymoon fly, kissingbug, and two-headed bug.  I believe that these are all inaccurate, although two-headed bug comes close.  The only truly accurate nomenclature for these freaks of nature is "fuck bug."  Because love has nothing to do with it. 

The Bright Side of Death

It's the end of another year and I'm still around, although sadly, my husband did not make it to his 77th birthday which would have happened on December 31.  Since my mother died at age 63 in 1982, this is the first time I have had to face the death of a loved one.  Trying to make sense of his dying makes no sense.  A year and a half ago he was walking three miles a day, healthy and happy, and then the kind of back pain that at 76 one assumes is just that turned out to be cancer, and the cancer turned out to be bigger than all the powers that medicine could bring to him.  And that, my friends, is life. 

I have learned over the past year and a half that I am not alone in my obsession with death.  The evidence is everywhere.  For example, the weather forecast for today's Onion reads:  "75 -- Sunny -- still one day closer to death, though."

I'm currently reading Smoke Gets In Your Eyes : And Other Lessons from the Crematory by Caitlin Doughty.  She is a young woman who has decided to tackle her lifelong fear of death by going to work at a crematory.  She is expecting that facing the death of others -- and actually participating in the postmortem ritual -- will allow death to become just another part of her life.

That's a bit of what I have been doing lately, but without the ashes.  Here is some of what I have come up with:

A quick death -- a massive heart attack, a fall from a tall building, a fatal crash -- happens so quickly that a person cannot possibly register enough pain to think, "This is unbearable."  That would be a good thing.

A long, painful death, as with the evil beast cancer, I believe is a game of "Let's Make a Deal" that doesn't end until, well, it ends.  We weigh the amount of pain caused by both the cancer and the treatments with the amount of hope we have for the time we have left.  Those of us who are so inclined pray and try to look forward to a pain-free afterlife.

I find the whole idea of afterlife fraught with confusion and contradictions.  Like, I'm assuming that most who believe in life after death think in terms of being reunited with those they love.  How about those they don't love?  How about those they love who don't love them?  Maybe when you leave your body behind your soul also sheds all those petty aggravations.  But then what happens?  Are you and all your wives and exes just friends?  Do you hang out with the boss you couldn't stand?  And does he (or she) treat you well, or just the same as everybody else up there?

What about the things you loved here on earth?  Good food, football, the beach, spy novels:  if these are the things that define you, when you get to heaven do you get to have them all, or do you no longer need them, and in that case, then, who the heck are you?  That would pretty much make us all one spiritual blob, or maybe millions of singular blobs, indistinguishable one from another, wouldn't it?

Lots of authors have tried to visualize heaven, some of them narcissistic enough to publish their work as non-fiction.  Some talk to a voice they claim is God, and who basically tells them everything they want to hear about life after death.  Hard to find someone who says, "You know, God contacted me the other day and said I was totally wrong about the afterlife."  The exception to that is all those people who weren't worried about dying until they were, and then they suddenly "found" God, who astonishingly did not tell them shame on you, you are going to hell, but instead was so happy they had stumbled upon Him that he gave him a pass into heaven.

I realize I am ruminating here, but, hey, that's what this blog is supposed to be about, okay?  I had hoped to write a funny piece about death and dying, because humor has helped me with all kinds of trauma and tragedy in my life.  But it's not easy.  Maybe because death is THE irrational thing about life.  I could be sitting here writing this thing on death and then....  nothing.

Seems to me Terry Pratchett has nailed the concept of Death.  Death, the character in Discworld who is responsible for collecting us when it's time, speaks in all capital letters.  Death wears the traditional garb, and at the time where you may or may not be dying, you just might have a conversation with Death.  In The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents, Maurice bargains away one of his lives so that a rat can live.  That is probably about as believable about any entering heaven story you might come up with.

Because living and dying are such baffling concepts, and we are persistent in our attempts to find meaning in our being here, we continue to make up stories that allow us to go on as though our existence makes sense.  But the fact is: we are here and then we are not, except for the compostable material.  Neil DeGrasse Tyson is just delighted by how huge is space and how infinitesimal and insignificant are we.  I suppose that is the quintessence of the defense mechanism of reaction formation, converting your terror into delight at an inevitable horror.  I have to admit, I like it.  It matters not that Neil DeGrasse Tyson is brilliant and will be remembered in history as long as people exist and think and that I have, well, this blog.  It is still a perspective that makes more sense than we are all going up to this place where nobody will have any negative feelings about anybody and for that matter will no longer have positive feelings about earthly stuff.

This is what I think about death.  Death is sleep at the end of a continuum.  When we go to sleep, we don't consciously fall asleep.  And we all think the best sleep is the dreamless sleep.  So when I go I like to think that it will be just like falling asleep.  And then there will be nothing left of me except all the stuff I have that my family will be stuck getting rid of.  And I won't be around to feel bad about it.

What could be wrong with that?

Cigar Memories

Stephan was a cigar smoker, after his dad.  From a young age, and unapologetically.

Shortly after we met, on our first actual date, we were in Baltimore.  We had dinner at Fell's Point, and I remember an old building, like a courthouse, with stairs, and Stephan doing a Gene Kelly-esque dance down the stairs.  With cigar in hand.  That may have been the night that he told me that if he had to choose between cigars and me, well, he liked me, but....

A couple of years later, we were visiting a very dear friend of Stephan's in Blue Bell, Pennsylvania.  At the time Herman was a confirmed bachelor, living with his father, who was into his 80's.  Two single men enjoying the good life, Herman a great cook who could do gourmet meals but was happiest making sauerbraten and spatzle, and both dedicated to good cigars.  Stephan brought dozens of fancy cigars and Herman had cigars he had selected to share, and that's what they did the entire weekend.  By Sunday evening I was craving air that was not laden with cigar smoke, but as we drove away, Stephan could think of nothing to prolong the weekend better than lighting up.  I opened the car window and hung my head out, much as a dog enjoying the fresh air.

There was the time I was visiting my best friend in New York.  I had gotten off the train and was walking uptown on 8th Avenue.  I suddenly got a strong, urgent sense of missing Stephan.  It was a warm and loving feeling.  Then I realized there was a dirty old guy walking alongside me, smoking an old stogie.

His sister drew a sketch of Stephan that ended up on the wall in his townhouse.  At some point, I came upon a picture of a cigar and realized what the portrait lacked:

And that was how it remained, until we moved from Columbia to Long Island.

When I left Maryland to begin graduate school on Long Island, Stephan came up with me to help me get settled.  He had happened upon a great smoke shop in a neighboring town and wanted to stop there on the way home, which meant he had to leave early.  We fought and he left to get his cigars.  Three weeks later, our letters apologizing to each other crossed in the mail.

Stephan's speech, cigar firmly planted, was a variant on the English language.  Friends and family mimicked him; my sisters and I once had a Stephan look-alike/sound-alike contest.  We borrowed a cigar and passed it around, each taking a turn to propound on some topic in those melodious but incomprehensible tones.  He was good-natured about it, but he didn't seem to get what all the hilarity was about.

I think most of us have left pots on the stove and forgotten about them.  We know that smoking in bed is dangerous.  But Stephan with a cigar was always an exciting experience.  Of course, all his shirts and coats had cigar burns.  And there was the time when he was visiting for Easter and went to Ambrose Farm to pick some asparagus.  I wasn't there for the occasion, but my son reports that he lit a cigar, tossed the match and a minute later, there was a small fire developing in the field.  Fortunately, my son yelled out in time and the fire was stomped out.

Another time, as he walked into the house in his heavy white winter coat, I noticed smoke coming out of a pocket.  He didn't seem unduly upset; apparently this was just one of those things that happen when you are Stephan. 

When he had surgery for pancreatic cancer a year and a half ago, Stephan stopped smoking.  He was worried that he would be unable to quit, but he went cold turkey.  The first few times he called me I didn't recognize his voice, and once I even asked if it was him.  Stephan without the cigar was truly new and different.

When he visited us in Charleston, Stephan had always spent hours upon hours sitting on my porch, reading and smoking.  He would come inside from time to time, for a meal or a movie, but would have to take a break to go out for a smoke throughout.  When I wanted to go sit outside with him for awhile I would say, "Let's go have a smoke."  Because regardless of where we sat, the smoke always blew my way.  There were times when it was too much and I would get annoyed.  It wasn't till he stopped smoking that I realized he had also been keeping away the mosquitoes.

He seemed not to have cravings after he stopped smoking, but when he visited me that November, a year ago, Stephan was worried.  He was afraid that if he went out on the porch and sat and read, the craving would return and he would give in to his old habit.  And of course, insanely, or because he just wouldn't have felt right not carrying them here, he had brought a few cigars.  But that never happened.  He had been having a hard time reading since the surgery, which was a far greater tragedy than not smoking, as he was a voracious reader.  But during that visit, he sat on the porch and read a book or two.  Happily, a Terry Pratchett Discworld book that I was about to read, that he had somehow, amazingly missed got him back on the road to reading.  And he did it sans cigar.

It was the cruelest gift, then, when his doctor told him he could smoke again.  It was a few weeks before his death, after a year and a half of prodding and poisoning, that his comfort took precedence over finding a cure.

We talked about the smoking and the cancer.  He knew the correlation.  But we never talked about whether he wished he had never smoked.  Smoking was his identity; it was what identified him with his father, who he loved and lost when he was in his thirties.  Maybe it isn't relevant that his father died of cancer, because the quality of Stephan's life so much involved the culture of cigars and smoking.  Some medical researchers say that we are genetically predisposed to when we are going to die, and some say that if that evil cancer lurks in us there may be little we can do to thwart it.

I know the pleasure Stephan got from his cigars, from the ritual of pursuing the best smokes to that of actually lighting up.  I don't think he regretted his life of smoking, and I don't begrudge him that choice.  And I know that anytime I ever smell the smoke of a cigar, I will imagine Stephan close by.

   

Lost Parents, Lost Children

My husband died a week ago.  We haven't lived together for fifteen years, but he was a friend.  Or a brother.  Like a big brother, he and I fought at times like cats and dogs, but when I needed someone to talk to, his was the number I called.  And with the miles, there were no fights.

When the cancer was diagnosed, it seemed that my daughter and I got closer, then began to grow farther apart.  The curtness, the distance between calls, the less we talked about what was personal, I attributed to stress at work, her father's illness, academic pressures.  Then I decided that because of all the above, she had just become annoyed with me, the way we sometimes are annoyed by those we love.

When he died, my daughter and son came together, but they kept me apart.  This past week, I have been here, they have been there.  When they changed plans to be together at Thanksgiving but away from me, my world crumbled a bit more.  It feels as though I have lost, not just my husband -- my best friend -- but my two children.  This feeling that I have today is about as alone a feeling as I have ever had.

In the wee hours of the morning, I went to the internet to look for clues, and maybe some solace.  It seems that when children become adults, even if they have grown up with love and the usual number of parental mistakes, some take paths that we would never have thought possible.

So it is with my daughter.  It was with some relief that I found stories of adult children who for no clear reason became estranged from their parents.  I, the psychologist, joined ranks with physicians and teachers, we who are supposed to know how to raise children and end up clueless as to what went wrong.  Assumptions of normalcy and dreams of closeness, out of our control.

It seems that all I can do is try to be there, and hope that some day she will take a tentative step back to trusting me, liking me, caring what I think, wanting me to be there.

So this will be a Thanksgiving of grieving for me.  For my husband, friend, brother, Stephan.  And also for my children who are (thankfully) together, but far from me.

On the Street Where I Live

Out here in the boonies, in my neighborhood, we have an odd assortment of crackpots, oddballs and individual thinkers.  I believe I fit right in.  We mostly ignore each other, which works well for me.  When I first moved here, I had heard about plenty of strange fights, some involving the calling of police, others involving alcohol and absconding with money collected from neighbors to repair our dirt road.  It was inevitable that at some point I would join in the merry fracas, but thought that keeping to myself would either make it less likely or at least less frequent.   I have wondered if I sometimes overreact, and if we country folk aren't that bizarre, despite Sunday morning target practice.  I would like to offer some proof to the contrary.

Yesterday I had a couple of friends out to enjoy the beautiful fall day.  Neither had been here before, and one of my friends got lost.  She was on the longish dirt road, and having a hard time making out the 4 digit numbers on the mailboxes, which is not at all uncommon.  At one point, my friend pulled into the wrong yard, and apparently, instead of backing out pulled around on the "grassy" "lawn" (I use both terms loosely when referring to the green stuff that grows on the ground in my neighborhood) and drove out.

Hours later, we were enjoying a glass of wine on my porch when a big SUV began to drive by, backed up, and then pulled into my "driveway."  It was the only car that we had seen in the hour or so that we had been out front.

"I wonder who that could be," said one of my friends.

"Doesn't look like Jehovah's Witnesses," I remarked as a white-haired, bearded white guy got out and slowly approached.

"What can I do for you?"  I asked.

He was looking for the driver of the little car that had pulled into his yard.  He wanted to let her know that he did not appreciate it, and wanted to make sure it did not happen again.

My friend, struggling to not look appalled, explained that she had been lost, apologized, and assured him that she would not repeat the indiscretion.  To her credit (and our great loss), she did not say that she was disappointed, because she had been planning on driving through later on her way out.  As it was, the trespassee looked somewhat taken aback at not having any way to further the fight, and awkwardly made his way back to his SUV

Okay, let's take a look at this.

These two guys were driving around looking for the car that had driven into their yard by mistake over an hour ago.  Since we hadn't seen them drive by before, I can only imagine that they had been sitting somewhere about their property, maybe the owner of the property getting increasingly peeved at the nerve of some people to drive into his yard.  Maybe he then went to the fridge and realized he had just drunk his last beer.  So he enlisted his companion to come out with him to drive around the neighborhood as a spotter in order to locate the miscreant.  Let me add that these are big front yards, her car was parked near the house and away from the street, in between our two other cars.  It took some effort to locate.

Imagine the psychic -- and physical -- energy this whole endeavor took, not to mention the paranoid thought processes and the gas consumption.

My friend appeared to be rattled by this, I much less so.  I have long held that if my neighbors were going to gun for me, with the fights we've had over loud and persistent racing of dirt bikes, and loud and persistent barking dogs, it would have happened by now.

Also, shortly before my friends got to my house, a quite large black snake made its way onto my porch, and after it quickly slithered away, came up a second time.

So I am no stranger to danger.

But as I thought about it later, given all the possible things that could be wrong in this dude's life, focusing on finding the person that drove into his yard to turn around could have reasonably been perceived as a red flag.  And I do mean red.  My friend suggested that part of his motivation may have been the Obama bumper sticker on her car.  I wondered how someone of my age could have made out the words on the bumper sticker from that distance, but years of country living just may have blessed him with better eyesight than me.

I had been disappointed that during their visit my friends had not been entertained by a reappearance of the black snake, nor a peek at my cat who hid under the bed until minutes after they drove away.  But they did get to witness an even more entertaining type of rural critter:  the paranoid, angry redneck.