Category: life

Every Day for a Year

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For the past decade or so, I’ve noticed a spate of books and articles in the vein of “The Year of…” fill in the blank. “The Year of Living Biblically.” “The Year of no Internet.” “The Year of Eating Only Locally Grown Foods.” I keep thinking I could write one called “The Year of Doing Nothing Much Special.”

Ah, but 2014 was the year I celebrated my 50th birthday, and I did set myself a goal for the entire twelve months. It wasn’t a hugely transformative change, nothing like learning to make my own clothing from organic cotton and then wearing only things I produced myself, or moving to a cabin in the woods with no electricity or indoor plumbing. My goal was simply walking a minimum amount every day.

I wanted a number that was meaningful in terms of my age milestone. I wanted to make it attainable and not too overwhelming so that I wouldn’t give up and not do anything at all. With two teens at home, managing things for an elderly parent, plus my day job, my life often resembles a frantic game of Whack-a-Mole. Time is a real issue. And money’s an issue. I can’t commit myself to something if it requires a lot of equipment. But I didn’t want to make it too easy. I wanted to have to make some effort and get enough exercise to benefit my health. I settled on 5,050 steps per day minimum. With my stride length, this works out to about 2 1/4 miles.

I’ve been writing down my numbers in a little journal, like Rain Man with his notebooks, each night before I go to bed. Date, steps, miles. I’m not sure why I need the documentation, but I have it.To be honest, I figured I’d have a at least a few off days where I didn’t quite make it. But I was wrong, peeps! I’ve met my minimum goal every single day for 365 in a row – January 1 through December 31.

Many days were easy. If I didn’t have to drive my son to school, I could walk to work. And once there, I’m often on my feet. I work split shifts two days a week, which means two round-trips on those days. If I’m able to walk both times, I can break the 10,000 mark without much extra effort. On days when I didn’t work and the weather was terrible (I’m talking ice storm terrible), I found myself doing things like walking in place as I stirred food on the stove. As my 16-year-old observed, “You can get a lot done if you don’t mind embarrassing yourself.” The biggest challenge came in early April when I had a terrible cold. But I made myself move. I’d get up off the couch every half hour or so and walk circles in my house while heating a tea kettle. Then I’d collapse and remain in a heap for another half hour while sipping tea.

I have an old friend who does nothing by half measures. One of his obsessions is physical fitness. As a friend, he’s 95% wonderful and 5% completely annoying. The 5% reveals itself when it comes to the topic of out-of-shape people. He used to be a little chubby himself, and you know how nobody is so fanatical as a convert. Several weeks ago, he posted a rant on Facebook about people using pedometers and how 10,000 steps a day was nothing as far as exercise. 10,000 steps should be a baseline and you had to do something else in addition to walking, he said. I started to respond with something along the lines of “Come live my life for a few months and then we’ll talk.” But then I realized this kind of thing is the reason there’s a “hide this post” option.

Yeah, 5,050 steps isn’t a huge number. But’s not nothing, either. It’s not even next to nothing; it lives in a different neighborhood. Yeah, my weight hovers on the line between what the current medical charts call the “normal range” for my height and what they call “overweight.”  But I had all of my middle-age tests done and got excellent numbers on my report. Cholesterol, triglycerides, blood pressure – all great. My doctor actually used the word “optimal” and said she wished her numbers were as good as mine. So I figure whatever a bathroom scale has to say falls into the “hide this” category along with my friend’s fitness rant.

It feels good to have stuck with it. I find value in making myself  keep going, even when I don’t feel like it, in order to meet a bigger goal. And no matter how little in the mood I am for walking, once I start I always remember that I love it. I love walking. There’s a however coming, though…

However, for 2015, I’m allowing myself an occasional day off. I’m upping my overall minimum steps goal, but measuring it in weekly increments. I plan to count weeks Monday-Sunday. If I have my steps in by Saturday, I can relax for a day. If I’m behind, Sunday is a good day to catch up. My target for the new year is 45,000 steps per week. If I meet it, I will have walked 1,000 miles by the end of the year.

Goodbye 2014. I’m closing the book on you.

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Onward to a new year.

 

 

How We Flunked Story Time

may_28_6968_frog_tadpole “Story time saved my sanity.” Thus proclaimed a friend with children much younger than mine. She gushed to me how much her family loves the library, and especially the children’s programs.

This sent my mind into a reminiscence of my own family history. I didn’t reveal to her my shameful secret. But I will confess it here. When my daughter was three and my son a newborn, our family flunked out of story time. At the very library where I now work.

It had to do with the green paper circles. Lily pads you might call them if you were a story time lady presenting a tale about frogs. Or, if you were my then 3-year-old daughter, you might call them wall dots, green steering wheels, round green hats, or frisbees. In her eyes, the possibilities were endless.

“Let’s sit on our lily pads little frogs, while we hear a story!” prompted the cheerful story time lady. 10 or 11 out of the group of 11 or 12 little frogs obediently criss-cross apple sauced on their lily pads.

“Frogs sit *on* their lily pads, not *under* them,” said the story time lady, still cheerfully.

“Mine’s a hat!” said my three-year-old, also cheerfully.

“Okay, well, let’s get the story started,” said the story time lady, gamely.

As the other children were doing the finger plays, my daughter was driving us to the store with the steering wheel that had been so thoughtfully provided. “I’ll drive since you’re holding the baby,” she whispered to me.

“Remember to sit on your lily pads,” prompted the story time lady, a little sternly, as the story ended and she prepared to begin a song. This time she was looking at me, a look that told me I was allowing my kid to Set a Bad Example, and I should begin enforcing the story time rules like a Good Mother.

But she’s not being disruptive, I thought back at her. She only whispered once, right in my ear. If I argue with her, that will be disruptive.

I don’t remember the song, probably something to do with amphibians. I remember I sang along, while wearing a green paper hat, held on my head by my kid. It was only fair that I have a turn, after all. See, I had taught my child about taking turns and sharing. Not a total loser mom, huh?

As a finale, there was a second song. And the kids were allowed more action this time, hopping, a little, in place, on cue. Or in one case, doing a small interpretive dance – The Dance of the Green Circle. My inner being was divided between mortification and fierce pride. I know which side the story time lady came down on, as she threw in an extra demonstration of the proper form of hopping.

As the program ended and parents left hand-in-hand with their children, I saw some other families grouping together, comparing this experience with story times of other weeks. Apparently they had a story time clique. Their offspring had been in training since birth. And here I thought I could bring in my wild child starting at the advanced age of three and have her fit in.

Said child, meanwhile, now that she was allowed to move around and talk freely, was pointing out to me all of the things you could do with a circle of green paper. You could decorate a wall with it. You could tuck in the top of your shirt in back and have a round superhero cape. You could hide your face behind it to play peek-a-boo with a baby. You could use it as a baby blanket. After a minute, my mixed feelings coalesced into amazement at my kid’s mind and attitude – that she could be so excited and could see so many possibilities in circle of paper.

I glanced around at the other families, with their conforming kids, who would have fit right in on that planet in “A Wrinkle in Time” – the one where the children bounced their balls at the exact same time on the exact same schedule every day. Suddenly, they seemed a little, hmmm, soulless might be the word? Those poor moms and dads, seeing the limitations of their merely adequate children exposed in the bright illumination cast by the creative genius shining from my daughter. Yeah, I couldn’t put them through that again.

We’d stick to our informal weekly playgroup and leave the organized story times for those others. I imagined the librarian in charge of the program that day thinking of us as “not story time material.” I suppose some people might look at it as having failed, and at times I have looked at it that way, too, wondering why my kid has such a hard time getting with the program. But I prefer think of it more as not a good fit. See how non-judgmental I’m being about the others’ rigidity and lack of imagination?lilypad

The same dynamic would continue to play out in public school as the years went on. My older kid often had “better” ideas than the teacher about how an assignment should be done. Some teachers loved this and used it to advantage. In those classes, my child learned a lot and accomplished some remarkable creative achievements. Others instructors – I call them lily pad teachers – lived by the philosophy “Rubrick uber alles!” My offspring showed a marked failure to thrive in those classrooms.

I never have completely sorted out my feelings. No, I don’t think the school should have to convert any of their computers from qwerty to Dvorak because one kid think it works better. (Pick your battles, child.) But yes, I do think my then-10th-grader should have been given extra credit instead of a zero on that world history report for having gone so far above and beyond in research and effort, in having a desire to do something that wasn’t a rehash of every other paper that had been written in the same classroom for the past decade.

Eventually the little frog grew strong enough to hop its way out of the public school pond and forge its own path to college, via self-study and a GED. Have I mentioned the college major? – Fisheries and Wildlife. Lack of preschool success at frogdom notwithstanding. I guess it didn’t go on the permanent record.

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Poem: Seeds

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Here in the middle of the U.S., we just passed the frost date. So it’s time to plant. Here’s a seasonally-inspired poem I wrote:

Seeds

“Here it is,
The start of my first garden,”
she tells him.
Two dozen flat seeds
the color of milk, round with a point,
pour from a paper packet.

He wants to know what else she plans to plant
other than bell peppers.

She hasn’t decided yet,
but thinks it will be wonderful
to raise her own food.
She’ll cook more from scratch,
maybe even learn to can.
Gardening is great exercise;
she knows she’ll lose weight.
She hopes to figure out that sewing machine
she picked up at a garage sale
to make her own dresses.
Who knows?
She may need maternity clothes soon.
Healthier living should improve their chances.
At least she thinks so.
She wants to know what he thinks.

He thinks it seems like a lot to expect
from one little handful of seeds –
to grow a whole new life.

**

This poem originally appeared in “Mid-America Poetry Review.”

How I’ve Kind of Sort of Taught Myself to Play Piano Just a Little

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“Do you play an instrument?”

When this question comes up in conversation, I usually answer it with “No, not really. Well, sort of. I mean, I’m not good, but I can kind of play piano about this much.” I hold my thumb and forefinger an inch apart to demonstrate how small my musical accomplishment really is.

When I was in grade school I became fascinated with the two pianos in our school – one in the auditorium and one in the music classroom. I remember the day the music teacher let each of us in turn practice a middle C scale. And that’s about all I recall from music class in my elementary years. Mostly, I remember daydreaming about playing the piano in the auditorium when we were stuck in a boring assembly. A couple of times in fifth grade, when my class was supposed to be working on sets for a class play, I snuck over to the piano and started pressing keys simply to hear the sounds. I don’t know why, growing up in a house where Hank Williams was considered a deity, I developed a liking for the sound of the black and white keys. Maybe it was a form of rebellion, since a keyboard is seldom used in country music, or at least not the country music my parents favored.

I’m not claiming to be high-brow in my musical tastes. I like me some pop music. But especially when that pop music heavily features keyboard of some kind: Elton John, Carole King, Stevie Wonder, Bruce Hornsby, Coldplay, Lady Gaga (yes, even though I’m thoroughly ensconced in my middle-aged years; I try to concentrate on the music and not the meat dress or whatever.) I’ve always kind of wished I knew more about music, but didn’t know how to go about learning. My dad had a guitar and a fiddle that he’d picked up used somewhere, and he taught himself to play. But he wasn’t one to let kids mess with his stuff. And paid music lessons in my childhood were as realistic a possibility as a trip to the Antarctic.

I signed up for band class when I went to junior high. I played clarinet because I had to use a school instrument and took what was available. I did learn some about reading music and my ear got trained a little, but let’s just say clarinet was not my destiny. For years I stuck with playing the radio, the daydream of piano hovering in the back of my mind, surfacing occasionally. It wasn’t so much that I felt deprived over it not happening in real life, but that I enjoyed having a fun little fantasy sometimes.

Then my kids came along and my husband’s sister had their childhood piano sitting in her house, unused. The soundboard was slightly cracked, but it would do for the kids to start learning. When my daughter was nine and my son six, we acquired the instrument and I signed my kids up for piano lessons. For the first little bit, I sat in the teacher’s living room, petting her dog, and listening to the instructions she gave the kids.  Following along at home, using the lesson books, I’d practice the same things they were learning. I used to spur the children to practice by pretending to compete with them, saying things like “You don’t want me to get better than you, do you?”

My daughter stuck with lessons for six months, then decided to pursue other interests. But my son – let’s just say piano does seem to be his destiny.  After a couple of years’ time, he’d passed me right up. I couldn’t keep pace with him. When he was 10, my mother-in-law and sister-in-law pooled their money to buy us a new piano, and he was in heaven, using an instrument that sounded the way it was supposed to. By the time he was 11, he was choosing Philip Glass pieces to play in recital. He’s 15 now and not only still plays, but also owns a MIDI keyboard he keeps plugged into the computer so he can compose and record his own original music.

Meanwhile, I’m still plugging along, inch by inch, through children’s lesson books, supplemented with YouTube tutorials. My practice has fallen by the wayside a couple of times, for periods of a few months, but I keep coming back to it. When I say inch by inch, I mean my progress is soooo slow, and by slow I mean think in terms of those drops of pitch that hung suspended for many years before finally falling in that Australian study. For one thing, I can only squeeze in 20 minutes or so of playing, about three or four days a week. After nine years, off and on, I’m finally at the end of the fourth instruction book.

I no longer have any pretense that my playing has anything to do with encouraging or assisting my children in any way. I know I’ll never be good, really, and I have no desire to try to perform for anyone else. My fingerwork is too staccato, and unlike my father and my son, I don’t possess an innate ear for the notes . But I’ve learned more about music, which means I get more out of the music I listen to. Plus, playing an instrument is supposed to help your brain function. My brain will take all the help it can get. And I enjoy it so much, those little 20-minute sessions of daydream fulfillment.

So yeah, I play piano now. Kind of. A little.

 

 

 

Happy International Peace Day

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Happy International Peace Day!

What are your favorite books about peace?  Here are a few of mine:

“The Story of Ferdinand” by Munro Leaf. This story of the bull who refused to fight remains one of my best-loved children’s books. I love how Ferdinand has nothing to prove and only wants to be himself, sitting peacefully among the flowers.

“The War Prayer” by Mark Twain. Think about what you’re praying for when you pray for victory in war. Really think about it.

“Slaughterhouse Five” by Kurt Vonnegut. For all of it SciFiNess, this gives a very realistic look at how unromantic and ridiculous war is.

“The Secret Garden” by Frances Hodgson Burnett. Yep, I consider this kids’ tale to be a book about peace. There’s nothing about resisting organized battles, but there’s lots about people from different backgrounds coming together and discovering the dual powers of love and responsibility to improve their lives.

Shows With a Strong Female Lead

janeway   LizLemon    RosemaryThyme     VicarDibley

 

 

 

 

Oh hey, Netflix does know what I like. “Shows with a strong female lead” is now one of the categories it offers to me. Interesting I should notice this tonight, after reading an article today documenting the dearth of women in contemporary movies. I suppose I have been tending toward the strong female leads lately, given a wide variety of choices.

My husband and I lived without a television for many years, at his request.  But now we are TV owners and get most of our shows through Netflix instant streaming. (We don’t actually have a cable package and I don’t see one in our near future.) There is a gender divide when it comes to watching habits in my household. My husband and 15-year-old son watch something on rare occasions; my 18-year-old daughter and I are the main viewers.

I’m catching up on stuff I missed over the years. So much Star Trek! I watched Next Generation and Deep Space Nine – all of the episodes. Then, without noticing it, I started a series of series with women at the fore: Thirty Rock, Star Trek Voyager, a British mysteries series called Rosemary and Thyme. Currently my daughter and I have a standing Thursday evening date to watch Vicar of Dibley, starring the very funny Dawn French.

I remember some shows I used to watch when I was a kid. For a while my brother and I sat glued to reruns of The Wild Wild West after school almost every day. Or maybe only I was glued, but I recall him being there. I loved tracking the exploits of two undercover agents in the old west. They employed clever disguises and even cleverer technological gizmos. I used to pretend to have adventures with James West and Artemus Gordon. I’d help them recover the stolen treasure. I’d disguise myself as a sheriff or a poker player or whatever the situation called for. Together we’d outsmart the villain. Often, the two heroes required rescuing by me. I made my mom nervous as many of these games involved climbing around in the trees in our back yard, to the highest branch I could reach.

I managed to overlook the typical women’s roles in the show, which were, as I recall, to look pretty, wave a fan while batting eyelashes, fall in love with the agents, get held hostage, and things along those lines. Then one day I could ignore it no more. I came home, settled in with my snack, and turned on the tube, eager to see what my heros were up to that afternoon.  To my short-lived delight, the two leads fell in with a woman who was their match. She dressed in practical clothing that allowed her to move through action scenes. She shot guns. She did everything the guys did – everything I did in the stories I made up. It was thrilling. So thrilling! Right up until the gentleman solved the “problem” of her behavior by getting a proper woman to convince the strong female lead how delightful it would be to put her energy into wearing frills and make-up instead doing all that tiresome actiony stuff. I still get a bad feeling in the pit of my stomach when I think of the final scene, where my two ersatz partners in daydream adventure grinned at each other with self-satisfied smirks over the two women giggling in the background, the tomboy having been shown her place. I watched a few more episodes after that, but any enjoyment on my part was half-hearted. No longer could I gloss over how people of my gender were portrayed and treated. No longer could I fail to acknowledge the lack of any place for a girl in these adventures.

I’d like to be able to look back and say, “What was it with that one show anyway?” But it wasn’t only The Wild Wild West. I had the same experience multiple times. Starsky and Hutch. Let’s talk about them, shall we? I didn’t have quite the attachment to these two buds as I did to the West/Gordon duo, but I liked the show pretty well. They engaged in entertaining banter sometimes and besides, all the kids at school watched it, so I needed to be in the know or be left out of conversations.

I was a little older and a little more skeptical. Already, I had to work to suspend my disbelief over some of the plots. “You’re going undercover as a hair stylist? Really? You can do that without the months of training that hair stylists go through? Gonna just pick up a pair of scissors and start snipping?” I may have rolled my eyes, but I continued to tune in. Until the episode with the reporter.

A female reporter arranged to shadow Starsky and Hutch so she could write a feature on them. Did I forget to mention? An attractive female reporter. The two police officers proceeded to act a lot like some of the sixth-grade boys in my class at school, trying to impress the girl by being jerks. As the story unfolded I found myself thinking the two cops should be glad I wasn’t the reporter, because I’d write something pretty scathing. As it turned out, the reporter wrote a pretty scathing piece about them and their not really cool or constitutional antics. Ha! I laughed, figuring they were going to see what they really looked like to others and mend their ways. Yeah, not so much. They got angry. And then they got even by more or less kidnapping the reporter and acting like even bigger, more unconstitutional jerks, to show her. And she learned her lesson. Properly chastened, she wrote a retraction of her previous article, explaining how the two men were true heroes, something her tiny brain had been unable to grasp at first. I never watched another episode after that. Ever. To this day.

Properly chastened – this was the most galling part to me. It was bad enough that the male leads thought the women needed to be put in their places and treated them accordingly. The worst thing was how meekly the women accepted it. With humility, they came to realize and admit they had no business trying to do the same things men did, nor any right to criticize a man’s actions, especially not a male authority figure. And Starsky and Hutch were supposed to be rebel cops – hmph!

But wait, there’s more! Off the top of my head, I can come up with two more shows in which women’s roles were mansplained in ways that caused female characters to see the light. The Courtship of Eddy’s Father and My Three Sons both broadcast episodes with such edifying storylines. And don’t even get me started on the number of times I saw this scene repeated: Female guest star is being all female and hysterical, because she’s got it in her head that people should listen to her or something. So male lead grabs her and kisses her. She resists, but he doesn’t stop! Until she melts into his arms, because all she needed to be soothed out of her irrationality was to be force-kissed. My dad wasn’t anything resembling a feminist, but I’m pretty sure his view on someone kissing me against my will was that I should punch the guy if I could.

So now I have access to shows with strong female leads and I say “Yes, please!” Give me Captain Janeway, in charge all on her own, nobody having her back. No Starfleet Command available for consultation or reinforcement. Making all of the tough decisions and taking all of the consequences. Give me Voyager, which passed the Bechdel Test as a matter of routine. Give me scenes of three female crew members putting their heads together to fix a problem with the starship’s engine.

Give me Liz Lemon on 30 Rock, supervising a crew of eccentrics and somehow getting them all to do their jobs. Give me a female character who loves to eat as much as I love to eat and who is not apologetic about it. One who is truly flummoxed when forced to choose, at the airport gate, between the man she loves and the sandwich she loves.

Give me Rosemary Boxer and Laura Thyme, two middle-aged women who run their own gardening business and solve murder mysteries on the side, who dress in actual gardening clothes, duck boots and all. Their hair comes all unkempt and they get dirty. Plus they’re smart enough and brave enough to catch the criminals.

Give me a small English village’s first female vicar, one who can hold her own with the moneyed town councilor who is used to getting his way. One who is wise and caring and fallible and funny. One who is a strong female lead. Thanks for the category, Netflix.

Notes on Scraps of Paper

Often inspiration for a story or poem strikes when I’m in the middle of something else. My paying job, for instance. I have a habit of scribbling quick notes on scraps of paper, hoping I’ll remember the entire thought later. Sometimes I make notes on a book I’m reading. Sometimes I forget these notes until I rediscover the scrap of paper many weeks or months later. Maybe in the pocket of a pair of pants I haven’t worn in a while, to give a real example.

Here are some notes I just found in my own handwriting. It’s a list (?) on one sheet:

character identification

takes place night

extreme close up on eye

music

clothing – a.p. – true

horror lies in sympathy

What does it all mean? Your guess is as good as mine.

 

Earth Day Resolutions

I didn’t get to attend our city’s Earth Day celebration today because I was working. However, I have managed not to use a car all day. I walked to work. It’s not far, so I don’t save a lot of driving miles in one round-trip. On the other hand, I walk almost every time I go to work and I’ve had the same employer for nine years. It does add up. I figure at least 1,600 car miles displaced in that amount of time.

I’m continuing my effort to live a more environmentally friendly life by making one change at a time. Here are the steps I’ve taken since last Earth Day:

Reusable coffee filter. One of those things that pays for itself eventually. No more paper filters.

Reusable coffee filter in action.
Reusable coffee filter in action.

LED light bulbs. They’re much more energy-efficient than compact fluorescents, and contain no heavy metals. Also, they’re supposed to last longer – the package advertises 18 years. We’ll see. They’re still pretty expensive, so we’re replacing bulbs gradually, as they burn out.

Our new lighting.
Our new lighting.

Mesh produce bags.

I’ve been using canvas grocery bags for quite a while. But I was still tearing off the plastic bags from the rolls in the produce aisles at the grocery store when I wanted to buy a bunch of spinach or  several apples. Now I have these. They weigh next to nothing, so they’re not running up the price on fruit and vegetables by the pound.

Mesh produce bag
Mesh produce bag

No single one of these things is a huge change. But I hope, as with the walking, over the years it will add up enough to make a significant positive difference.

Next goal – a rain barrel or two.

 

A History of Snow

One thing I adore about my husband is that he loves to play in the snow. The first Christmas we were dating, he gave me a sled. Living in Missouri, we get two or three decent snows each winter, which is about right for me. I like snow, but not enough to live someplace like Buffalo, NY.

We’ve tried to pass on the “snow is for fun” attitude to our kids. Following is a collection of photos I’ve taken over the past few years of snow creations and activities involving my household.

Poem: Teen Dies in Shooting

I was sorting through some of my poems the other day, and came across this one I wrote several months ago. I know it could use some more polish, but it seems always sadly timely. It was based on a newspaper headline.

 

Teen Dies in Shooting

Teen Dies in Shooting
and mothers who read the headline
die inside a little more
from the combined effects of this
and child soldier documentaries
along with
Young Lives End in Car Wreck

Oh my children, let me go with you
everywhere to hold your hand,
throw myself in front of the gun,
hide you from the recruiters,
grab the steering wheel

Let me never lay myself down to sleep
lest something evil should happen
while I’m not keeping watch