LITTLE THINGS

Rocky Mountain View
The sound of my neighbor’s new air conditioner annoyed me as I sat on my patio attempting to enjoy the Saturday afternoon breeze with a cold seltzer water and the company of my little dog, curled under my chair. Earlier this morning, about an hour after sunrise, I sat in that same chair and listened to the whinny of a horse not far away on the farmland at the edge of my subdivision. A lone cricket still chirped nearby, and birds sang in the morning chill as the overcast of gray clouds broke into streaks of blue, promising the heat that stirred my too-long grass this afternoon.

I knew when I bought this house that eventually the subdivision would fill in and the empty lots to the south and east of me would sprout new houses, people, and the end of the peace and quiet I’d previously enjoyed. I thought at the time that I’d never be here, six years later, grouchy because the drone of a machine disturbed my afternoon. It never occurred to me that I would still be in this house six years later, period.

I thought when I bought the house that I could deal with neighbors in too-close proximity, because after all, I had grown up and lived most of my life on the edge of New York City. I didn’t stop to think that something had happened to me in the time I left New York and moved to Colorado. I’ve turned into a country girl. Or at least as much of a country girl as is possible for someone who spent 40 years as a New Yorker.

I learned there are places on the planet where you can sit out on your deck on a nice summer night and look up at the Milky Way arcing across the sky. Where it’s dark enough so that you can be driving along a country road, headlights on, and still see the stars at all. On a summer night in my house in the country, windows open to let in the cool air after a long day of heat, I could hear the coyotes yip and howl as they prowled the open lands and farms nearby.

I could hear my daughter’s horses snort and stamp in the barn when the air was still. Except for the nights when the moon shone full and white in the sky, it was almost black out. I learned when the moon was full you could see well enough to walk outside and actually see details of everything under your feet. There was so much artificial light at night where I grew up, the moon didn’t have a chance to reveal that kind of detail.

I thought the Milky Way and moonlit detail were for places like Africa, where I was lucky enough to go the summer I turned 17. By the time I got to look up at the night sky in Australia a few years ago, in the Outback, it didn’t surprise me that despite the torchlight around our dinner tables and the huge bonfire roaring nearby we could see the stars the Aboriginal storyteller was talking about. I still look with fascination at the Bald Eagles when I see them gliding in circles across an azure blue sky, but only because it makes me marvel at the difference between an Eagle in the wild and the grim, sad, shadow of the Bald Eagles I could see in the Bronx Zoo.

I don’t think I’ll ever be someone who likes tiny town life when the town is far from anything I would consider civilization. The tiny town I live in now is a few minutes drive from bigger places. A half hour drive from even more interesting bigger towns. There’s always Denver, maybe an hour away. I just never realized that living out in the “country” as I did before I bought this house would ruin me so badly for patio-home style living.

Out in the country outside of town I lived where I could still see a neighbor or two, but I wasn’t on top of them. I could wake up at 3:00 a.m. and go sit outside with one of my dogs and the only thing I heard was a cow lowing somewhere, or maybe the screech of some animal meeting its Maker in the claws of an owl. On a lazy afternoon I could sometimes sit on my deck and watch the seemingly endless freight trains rumble by on the far away ridge. I thought moving to town would be a snap.

I get it now why my out-in-the-country neighbor, a nice man who was originally from West Virginia, announced one day to his wife that Colorado had become too crowded and they needed to move. He was retired, after all, and he could make choices about how many people he wanted around him. When he told me they were planning to move to Montana because Colorado had changed and grown more than he liked, I thought, “Man, you don’t know what crowded is…”

Lo and behold, look what’s happened to me. A few years after we moved to Colorado and my husband and I were in Denver to see a show, my husband greeted me as I crossed a major street with the light instead of sprinting across as he had, with “My goodness, what’s the matter with you? You cross the street like a hick.”

Yeah. Maybe so.

CANCER CALLS

Yellow Bells
I joined an on-going spiritually based support group a few years ago. When I first joined I was a very unhappy, if not broken person. I was in the process of filing for divorce and leaving a thirty year marriage. It was more painful, and more challenging than I ever imagined. I clung to my group as the one sane hour, the one refuge I could count on in an otherwise insane time.

I was lucky to make a very deep and abiding friendship in those early months. I talked to my friend most every day. She, too, was going through a divorce. She, too, was challenged with creating a new identity for herself, with creating a whole new life without her husband. She told me it would get better with time. I felt so deeply in the dark at that time that I couldn’t even tell I was in a tunnel, never mind that there was a light at the end of it. I will be forever grateful for this friendship.

For the first year or so, everything was fine. We talked and talked. Sometimes we shared a meal together, or went to a movie. I invited her to my house for Christmas that first year, the first Christmas after my divorce became final. My kids spent the day with their father. It was a lonely holiday indeed, but I had a few friends to share it with. It was my first whole year in my new house. The first year I’d much used the oven. Somehow I turned the oven off in the middle of cooking the roast, so it never got done. Christmas dinner was shrimp cocktail and pie. Funny though that was, it made me sad. At least I had my new friend, Arlene, with whom to commiserate. I changed her name to protect her privacy, but all the facts here are true as I know them.

Over the next couple of years things got strange. When I talked to Arlene about working with another friend on a project she was organizing, Arlene came out point blank and told me, “Oh, no, you’re not allowed to have another friend.” She said it in a laughing voice, but I was to learn that the fact that I had relationships with other people put a strain on my relationship with her. As I mentally and emotionally picked myself up off the floor where I had landed after my divorce, I learned to assert myself again and make choices that felt better to me. I didn’t want to lean on Arlene for everything, all the time.

When I had a major surgery, I asked a different friend, someone who was a nurse, to spend the night with me on my first night home from the hospital. A second friend showed up and surprised me, filling my refrigerator with goodies a couple of hours after I got home that first day. I was to hear later that this was deeply insulting to Arlene, as she had planned to stay with me and cook for me and “take care” of me. She had not talked to me about it first, however. When I asked her to give me a ride to the doctor’s office after the surgery because I wasn’t supposed to drive yet, she did help me, but she wasn’t her usual warm self.

We never did get to talk about it directly. I just noticed she started to become short in our phone conversations. Things became so uncomfortable between us we basically stopped talking. Sometimes she gave me the cold shoulder if we ran into each other at group meetings. I heard of events in her life through others. I stopped calling for updates.

A couple of months ago she was diagnosed with breast cancer. I got the details from a mutual friend, who said Arlene didn’t mind if people wanted details of her condition. She had surgery to remove a few hot spots, and then they discovered that the cancer had indeed gone to a lymph node. She had to have more surgery. Now she’s going through radiation. It was as if the more I heard about her condition, the guiltier I felt for not calling, so I didn’t. I did write her a couple of cards and tell her I was thinking of her and praying for her.

Finally, yesterday, I “got over myself” as they say in my group. I dialed the phone and Arlene answered. “It’s wonderful to hear your voice,” I said. It felt good to listen as she told me about her journey. I remembered how much I owed her in the support she had given me when I needed it. She has to go through radiation, a bit every day, for a number of weeks. I know she lives alone, and her adult children aren’t nearby. I told her if she gets to a point where she can’t or doesn’t want to go alone, that I would be willing to take her and wait for her and bring her back home. It felt good to mean it when I said it.

After I got off the phone I thought for a bit about how dumb it is not to make a call, or volunteer to do something, or take a step to heal a relationship before it gets so strained as to be non-existent. This was once a valuable relationship. Maybe we have grown differently, and maybe we’ll never be as close as we once were, but that is no reason to let the relationship fall by the wayside. That phone might seem to weigh fifty pounds. It might be hard to remember the number I dialed every day for months. That’s no excuse, however. Even if you feel like an idiot for not doing it sooner.

I’m sorry it took a cancer diagnosis for me to get my act together. I should have picked up the phone and called her months ago and at least made an effort to reconnect. I am pleased with myself that I finally did it, however, even if it’s kind of late in the game. It felt so right to listen to my friend talk. There are plenty of other people I might just pick up the phone and call now, too. Or go visit. Arlene is teaching me yet another valuable lesson. “Don’t put off until tomorrow what you can do today,” the saying goes. It might just help with my procrastination.

“We aren’t promised tomorrow,” my heart reminds me. Yes. Today I get it. Thank you.

MY FATHER’S LESSON

Kiss of Sun
I am going to share a poem as part of this blog that I wrote shortly before my brother, Jim, died of melanoma. I found it recently as I have begun to gather some poems and essays that I wrote many years ago around my brother’s final journey. Jim had been in the hospital for a number of weeks as doctors struggled to figure out how to control his pain and continue his treatment for cancer.

Chemotherapy can be wicked in its effects on your veins and my brother was no exception. A decision was made to put a “port” in his chest because the veins in his arms were getting worn out.

In case you are lucky enough not to know what this is, a “port” is basically a catheter through the chest wall and into a vein which leads into the heart. Intravenous chemo can be administered, along with any other medication you might need, directly into your circulatory system. It works very well apparently, and can be a good solution to a problem such as my brother was experiencing.

However, it can also be a dangerous and tricky business which is why it’s never a routine treatment and is instead regarded as a last ditch effort. There is a high risk of infection and the port requires quite a bit of care to keep clean and sterile.

Within a few hours of receiving his port, my brother was supposed to finally be released from the hospital so he could go home. I was there with him to help him check out and gather his clothing, his prescriptions, his doctor’s orders and so on, so he could leave. Instead he began to feel unwell.

A short time later he began to flush and run a fever. I summoned a nurse to look at him. The time for him to leave came and went. His fever began to rage and the doctors worked to find an antibiotic that would tame the as yet unidentified pathogen that was making my brother sick.

It turns out that what my brother had was a Staph infection, caused by the insertion of the port. His healing crisis was so serious it was unknown whether he would live through the night. I elected to stay with him overnight that evening so other family members could take a break. At one point about 4 a.m., I seriously debated making the call to gather loved ones as he deteriorated. He lay there unresponsive, laboring to breathe each breath.

Then the third antibiotic they tried began to work, and as the night began to dawn into another day, my brother slowly returned. By the next afternoon you would never have known he had been so ill.

What I remember most about that night was how afraid I was for a while. Then a miracle occurred and I wasn’t afraid any more. I was filled with acceptance and a knowledge that everything would be all right, even if my brother passed that night. I don’t mean that I wouldn’t have been hugely upset, or full of conflict or turmoil or any of those feelings, just that the fear was suddenly gone.

This poem is the story of that journey.

MY FATHER’S LESSON

My father came to me in the night,
Fading in and out of my brother’s face,
As my brother lay burning with fever
On his hospital bed, packed in ice,
Juxtaposed, first one, then the other,
My father’s image matched his son’s,
Even to the sound of labored breath
By reflex heaving the chest up and down.

I remembered my father’s vigil,
Not so dissimilar to what I was seeing.
Lean were the bones in my father’s face,
Beautiful through milk wax skin,
They melded together, two men,
As I watched in the here and now.

I feared for my brother’s life,
I held his delicate hand, so hot, in mine,
Watched the ice melt in latex bags
On his head, under his arms,
My most precious brother, my friend,
Fighting for his life, and my long dead father,
Fading in and out, eerie, full of fear…

Would this be a night of death?

Gently, suddenly, I knew without words
My father showed himself as a gift, a comfort.
Comfort that wherever my brother walked,
Into life, or into death, he was not alone.
My father came in the night, to tell me not to fear.
For I, on one side of the veil, could help
In whatever way I was needed,
And if Jim could not survive all that cancer,
All that fever, all that ice,
If Jim had had enough, neither of us should fear.

For Daddy waited there, just in case,
Daddy waited to take his son home,
Could surely walk those paths
I could not see, and could not follow.
It would simply be handing him off
To a place where he wasn’t sick, or pained,
To a place where love abides
As surely as he is loved here.
Yes, my father came in the night
To tell me not to fear.

DIFFERENT DRUMMER

Trees in snow
I’m off to Sedona tomorrow to take a Reiki Master/Teacher class. It’s not a big deal anymore. It seems like everybody and their brother is trained in Reiki, at least out here in Colorado. I first took Reiki training almost twenty years ago when I moved to Colorado to help my little son with his asthma. He had been a sickly baby, constantly struggling with ear infections and respiratory problems, and taking one antibiotic after another in an effort to finally get him on a path of health.

Around his first birthday he managed to have a couple of weeks of good health and then his sister brought home Chicken Pox from nursery school. My son, of course, as the second one in the family to get it, ended up with a much worse case than his sister. That seemed to have encouraged his immune system to backslide again, and we ended up with weekly, sometimes more frequent visits to the doctor.

Fortunately, as I look back now, I had an old fashioned pediatrician for Geoff. Dr. Whitten had founded the neonatal department at our local hospital and knew his stuff. By the time I came along with my kids he was near retirement. He came to visit us in our apartment when my son was a baby. “I like to know how my patients live,” he told me, simply. “I don’t make house calls anymore, but if you ever need to, you can bring the baby to my house after hours.” Once or twice I would be frantic enough to take him.

Dr. Whitten was an interesting man. He was rather dull to most of the adults I knew who took their kids to him, but kids seemed to like him. He would patiently explain to me what he thought was wrong with my child and why he thought that. He would also explain why he prescribed the drugs he did, and what they were for. I didn’t realize I paid so much attention to what he said, and that I remembered it, until I had to deal with other doctors farther down the road.

One day when I was particularly frantic about how sick my son seemed, the doctor surprised me by what he said. “Some children take a while to decide if they want to be here,” he said. “Their immune systems don’t really seem to ‘get it’ until they are about two or older.” It was the beginning of an opening in my thinking about who we might be as human beings, eternal spirits coming in for a visit in a body.

So when we moved to Colorado and Geoff developed full-blown scary asthma, I really wanted to do something to help him besides feed him more drugs. I’ve often thought his immune system had been compromised by all those antibiotics and just hit overload under totally new flora and fauna at a mile high, in a dry climate. Reiki turned out to be something I could do for both of us in the middle of the night as he wheezed and coughed, wheezed and coughed, while I thought about calling the doctor or taking him to the emergency room. I often wished we had still had Dr. Whitten to help.

With Reiki I could lay my hands on my son, or I could lie on the floor and rest, sending him the healing energy. It often seemed to make a noticeable difference in an otherwise frantic night. My son is 22 now, with no measureable trace of asthma left, though sometimes if he gets a bad respiratory infection, he coughs that deep barking sound that still chills me to hear.

He used to complain after he hit his teen years, that I had stunted his growth with all those steroids the doctor prescribed. “Those drugs were terrible for me,” he said. “I didn’t need them. I didn’t have asthma. I was fine.” I think sometimes he likes to feed on my guilt. I didn’t like all those drugs, either.

He is 6’ 2” or maybe 6’ 3” now, and close to 200 pounds. His complaint makes me smile every once in a while when he still finds occasion to remind me. He’s not quite as big as his own father, or as my father was, but he is no little man. I know some children “grow out of” their asthma according to medical science, but I am certain my kid is the way he is because of the Reiki.

I am hopping on a plane tomorrow and going to finally take the class that will train me to teach others what I already know. I don’t know whether I really want to teach Reiki, but something has been nagging at me to finish the training as I pick it up again and use it more often in my daily life. You can use Reiki to clear space, for protection, for mental and emotional clarity, to find lost objects, and a hundred other things besides “healing.” It gives me something concrete to do when I feel uncertain.

In the ensuing twenty years since I took my first Reiki class I’ve learned all kinds of things. I seem to have an insatiable appetite for energy work, spiritual healing, working with crystals and stones, even prayer and meditation. For me the healing state, both as a practitioner and a client, opens doorways in my inner world that ultimately enrich who I am in this reality, and my ability to see and connect in to the greater reality that I first heard named by Gregg Braden many years ago, “The Mind of God.”

I’ll be flying home again on Sunday. Who knows where I’ll go from there?

LAST NIGHT

Rain at Twilight
I had the great joy of going with several of my friends last night (girl’s night out) to a Bruce Hornsby concert at Mishawaka amphitheatre, north of Fort Collins in the Poudre River canyon. It’s a beautiful drive through open country, away from the city, and finally along the narrow, winding road that follows the Poudre River up into the foothills of the Rocky Mountains.

The road closes in suddenly, and the steep canyon walls are beautiful vertical expanses of rock, dirt and grass, and tenacious small evergreen trees. It’s the walls of the canyon itself that create this “amphitheatre” effect at a wide spot in the shoulder of the road and narrow spot in the river. Unfortunately due to recent fires and the devastation wrought by the pine bark beetles, a huge percentage of the trees and undergrowth that hold the dirt to the sides of the canyon have perished.

We’ve had torrential summer thunderstorms lately, always a hazard in “burn areas” because of the potential for rock and mud slides that slosh with little warning treacherously and unpredictably across the roadway, blocking travel into or out of the canyon, and leaving you stuck in place until earth movers can come along and scrape the debris off the road. On our drive up the canyon there were a couple of places where it was obvious that earthmovers had been busy scraping the road clear not that many days ago.

It’s been a long time since I’ve gone to an outdoor concert, and an even longer time since I’ve listened to Bruce Hornsby, but I’m old enough to have been a major fan in his heyday and I still love his music today. We got to sit on plastic lawn chairs on a gravel expanse in front of a raised stage framed by rough hewn pine logs. Lots of people jammed in and stood happily in front of the stage, waiting to dance. Liquid refreshment of all sorts and horsepower flowed freely. The smell of grilling hamburgers and other meats soon filled the air. We got there very early in order to find chairs and the space to put them in. It was fun sitting around and talking. When the rain started we put on our raincoats and ponchos and hoped to sit it out.

There was little wind, it wasn’t particularly chilly, and there was no lightning. There was still plenty of light so that we could see in the circle of sky above us tiny promising patches of blue among the rainclouds. Then it started to rain harder. Visions of trying to drive home as the mud slid down the side of the canyons filled our minds and our conversation. I began to think it was going to be a drag to sit in the rain even if Bruce Hornsby did stay and play.

Fortunately as it neared showtime and the sun began to set, the rain let up. A huge, perfectly formed, multi-colored rainbow arched across the canyon wall behind us. People craned their necks to see the spectacle against the purple rain clouds. It was a good omen, indeed. Bruce Hornsby had come from his big city venue in Denver the night before, and there he was singing away with his signature piano and band in front of, maybe, a couple of thousand people. The sky darkened and directly overhead the Big Dipper appeared, sparkling in the night.

There was drinking and there were clouds of marijuana smoke (legal here, now) but it was a very mellow crowd. A large majority of attendees were like me…decades past the college concert age. Bruce himself is no longer a spring chicken and his voice isn’t quite what it used to be. That didn’t mean the concert was any less wonderful. He played lots of stuff he hadn’t played in a while, he said. He played a couple of hits. I think he has more flexibility in little venues. Maybe the fans are less demanding and controlling. I got the feeling he has his following that chases after him when he’s on tour, always wanting something new.

The concert broke up and we drove down the canyon, sashaying left and right around the curves, headlights playing off the rock walls and the white line at the edge of the road. The big Chevy Tahoe carried six of us comfortably, and might even have been able to deal with mud and rocks, had there been any. The moon shone in the sky once the canyon walls lowered and we had enough view of the sky to see it. We told each other paranormal and Bigfoot tales as we drove along. Bigfoot has been seen in the Rockies, Colorado in particular.

It took a while to say goodbye as we went our separate ways at the meeting spot parking lot. I still had a half hour drive to go since I don’t live in Fort Collins like the others. I ended up picking up my son’s girlfriend at this late hour to bring down to town because my son’s car didn’t have gas and he had no money. Fortunate for him that I just happened to be tooling down the road when he called (probably to borrow either my car or money). Fortunate for me I was in a good mood and willing to assist.

“You look nice tonight, Mom,” he said when he saw me. “What’s up? Something different? Did your hair? New clothes? What?” he asked.

I thought about it for a minute. “No, I’m just happy,” I said. “I had a good time with my friends.”

MULE EARS

Lillies
I don’t remember exactly what prompted the name “Mule Ears” to be a joke between me and my father, said name being called one to the other in any situation which involved stubbornness. If one thought the other was being too long-winded about any topic that related to “stubbornness,” then it was okay to put two fingers up behind your head (to indicate mule ears) and hee-haw loudly at least once or twice while making a funny face. This usually totally disarmed the other and the resultant humor dissolved any stickiness or anger that might have been in the air.

I never remember taking advantage of this and using it when my father may have had a real case about something he was talking about, like whether I brought the car back on time when I borrowed it, but it certainly worked well when he would try to correct me about something I thought was not reasonable. Usually that had to do with anything my mother had set him up to tell me.

My mother and I did not get along well, especially in my later teens when I needed to become autonomous. There was absolutely nothing that I ever did that was right, or ok, in my experience, in my mother’s eyes. She didn’t like my clothes, she didn’t like my friends, and as far as I could tell, she didn’t much like me, either. Her values were very different from mine, too, despite her best efforts to turn me into a W.A.S.P. bigot.

She was shocked beyond words when I refused the engraved invitation I received to “come out” after I graduated from high school. This was a pretty coveted invitation and all her work to make sure my social standing was acknowledged was on the line. She actually tried to get me to change my mind by telling me that the girl who lived across the street, who had been my classmate since early childhood, would NOT be receiving an invitation. She was Italian, after all. And even worse, a Catholic.

When I still insisted on refusing, she turned her back to me and walked away. “Well then you must keep that invitation in a safe place for the rest of your life because the day will come when you will regret this decision. At least you will have the invitation to prove you were once invited!” she huffed as she disappeared around the corner of the living room.

Fortunately for me, my mother never got a chance to rub my nose in this as she obviously expected to at some point. I am now several decades older than I was then, and I have yet to regret my choice, or to have suffered any ill effects. I do, however, think I still have that invitation somewhere…maybe it’s in with my baby photographs on my bedroom closet shelf. I was obedient about some things, but mostly to prove my own point…i.e. that my life did not and would not ever depend on whether I was “presented to society” in this particular way.

Once in a while I would pull the “hee-haw” maneuver at the dinner table when my mother would get into a rant with my father about some perceived slight my mother received at work, or from a friend, or something I had done that she didn’t like. By then I was in my late teens and didn’t succumb easily to what my mother considered so important.

“Heee-haaww,” I would bray, catching my father’s eye and wiggling my fingers whilst screwing up my face as my mother drew breath between paragraphs. That’s all it took. Even she would sometimes laugh so hard she could hardly breathe. It didn’t mean she was any less determined to make her viewpoint understood, however.

I committed a dire sin in my mother’s eyes one birthday when I was nineteen or twenty. My mother’s birthday was in June, and she absolutely wanted it to be a special day, hers and hers alone. I had gone out of my way to find a really nice present for her and had found and purchased something special for her.

Along the way, however, I had also found the perfect present for my father. Shopping for my mother, I found a three-inch tall brass donkey sitting back on his haunches, his long ears going off in different directions, his mouth open in an obvious bray. I gave the presents to them both at the same time, on my mother’s birthday. My father’s snort of laughter absolutely pissed off my mother, who threw the box with her present from me onto the coffee table with derision.

I didn’t always mean to make my mother feel badly, but she was such the perfect “straight man.” Every once in a while she could come out with something hilarious herself, but those moments were few and far between. And much to her dismay, all three of her children had their father’s sense of humor.

My father died when I was in my twenties. I still have “Mule Ears” the brass donkey, though it has been a while since I’ve seen it. I only have a couple of material things from my father’s life, but to my dying day I will have his sense of humor, whether I find that donkey again or not. I must say every once in a while I do feel sorry for my mother, who despite her best efforts always seemed to be the brunt of it. He-ee-ee-Haa-www! Sorry, Mom.

CONNECTION

Smiling
I woke up from a very sad dream this morning that felt overwhelming. The recurrent theme was about loss and how final it is, given the parameters of this life as I understand it when I get into the kind of mood the dream fostered. The loss was deep, grabbing your heart and making it sit unmoving in a very dark place. I thought of my brother, my mother, and the three dogs; all of whom I’ve lost to death in recent years. Yes, death is final.

I thought of things that are equally final, like the end of a marriage, even though the person to whom I was married for thirty years is still alive. I thought of meaningful friendships that have passed away, and the once important people with whom I no longer have any contact. Family relationships have shifted and changed, too. My children have grown up and are moving on. The latter might be positive, the way it is supposed to be, but I can wallow in that loss.

Truth be known, this is a dreary place to be, especially just as the sun is coming up.

I didn’t get out of it right away. I went and sat in my meditation room. I wasn’t going to overcome this mental space with meditation, I thought. I turned on the music and got out my pen and notebook. I decided to write a letter to God. “Help me, please.” I wrote. “Be my friend.”

I asked for a miracle. “Give me a great purpose.” I begged. “Let me relieve the suffering of the world.” The miracle for me is to move on, to get out of that black spot. It felt so big that only something big would fish me out of my own well of darkness.

“Z-z-z-z-t-t!” went my phone. “Z-z-z-z-t-t” it went again. “Meet you at 6:30?” said the text. My friend was asking me to come to the gym to workout. I would have to hustle to change into my gym clothes and get to the rec center on time. I threw the notebook on the floor. I couldn’t find my water bottle. I forgot where I’d put my sneakers. I got to our meeting place in the parking lot on time, though.

My friend is a personal trainer, though we meet as friends, not for a training session. She makes me do the cardio I hate, just because it’s good for me. Sometimes she relents and I can do less than the twenty minutes she herself does. Today I tried a new machine. “Uh-oh.” I thought. “I kind of liked that one.”

We lift weights, the part I like. She’s a good friend, we can talk about anything. We talked about raising fees for our work. Self worth is a good thing. It drums up business. Attitude really does matter. “See?” she said. “It’s ok to make money.”

I drove home in the glory of a summer morning. It’s not too hot yet. There’s a breeze. The farms are lush with crops. A couple of the irrigation systems are throwing out silver streams of water as I pass. The mountains are purple and gray and green off to the west, blue sky and white clouds above. The air smells fresh.

I eat a bowl of cut up berries and cereal in cold almond milk. It is delicious. My little yellow dog sits at my feet and begs for fruit. He wags his tail to attract my attention and gobbles what I give him with hardly a touch of his white teeth on the strawberry.

I take the dog out for a walk and stand in the breeze and the bright light. It is a perfect temperature. I find I have the patience to let him sniff every blade of grass, every yellow dandelion flower, every tree trunk, every stone that holds his attention. I realize somewhere along the line my mood has changed.

The streets are still damp here and there by the curbs where sprinklers have been running. Birds are chirping in the trees. Even the dog has his lips pulled back as he trots along and his curled tongue rises almost to his nose. I am happy to be alive. Loss? What loss? I am filled with what is all around me.

I found the “great purpose” I asked for in my earlier letter to Creator. It is simply to be present. To be aware. I get out of myself by paying attention to the simplest of things. The sunlight, the wagging tail of the dog, the sound of the breeze in the leaves of the trees; all are there whether I see them or not. Gifts await my taking. The darkness begins to brighten. It fades to meet the day.

I think I’ll unwrap another gift. A little girl comes to pat my dog. He licks her hand. What is the “truth,” anyway? Who cares?

EXPLOSION

Crows
I got up the other morning and was quickly scanning friends’ posts on Facebook before I went to the gym. There was a picture of a huge tree that had been blown to bits by lightning a few hours before with the caption “This is why you don’t want to stand under a tree during a lightning storm.” It was really pretty amazing. It never occurred to me that a tree would actually explode into chunks and bits and broken branches that were scattered all over the place. Then again maybe I just don’t know much about lightning.

The thing that was really interesting for me is that I had paid no attention to where the tree in the picture was located. A few hours after I saw the picture I drove to a coffee shop in Fort Collins to meet my friend. I pulled into a spot next to the CSU flower gardens, which were full of brightly colored blooming plants.

There was the smell of freshly cut wood, a pickup truck full of branches and a big tree surgeon’s truck with a bucket arm tucked down tight like he’d finished his work.

I sat down with my friend and she proceeded to tell me all about the tree that had been hit by lightning and how she and her husband had come to see it before it was cut down and that they had each found a small piece of the splintered tree to take home and keep. It was the very tree in the flower garden I had just parked my car next to.

After our coffee I walked around the flower park, and along with several other people inspected the remains of the stump and the few scraps of wood and limbs and leaves that were all that was left of the big tree. I found an appropriately nasty looking splintered piece and picked it up to take home for my personal souvenir. I think the tree must have been a big old Cottonwood. The wood still had a living smell, though it wasn’t strong.

When I was in college I wrote a poem about a tree that had been hit by lightning that my father had taken me to see when I was a teenager. He was a landscape architect and one of the things he did was document the location, type, and approximate age of cool old trees he found around the City of New York. The tree he took me to see that day was not that far from where we lived. If I remember correctly it was a huge old oak that had been hit by lightning and split in half. One half of the tree was totally burnt and blackened from fire, and the other half of the tree was untouched, its green leaves waving in the summer breeze.

The poem was about betrayal and how my heart had been broken by something that had happened to me as a young kid. It also talked about how that experience flavored the rest of my young life at the time with the remnants of that experience. It was a pretty good poem, actually, and my class mates mostly really liked it. My professor, a man I really liked and admired, seemed to take exception to it. “You are much too young to write such a dark poem,” he said. “I don’t want you to carry that kind of blackness yet. You haven’t experienced enough life.”

My professor fell off his pedestal a bit that day. I felt chastised for daring to speak my truth, and questioned about the sincerity or depth of my experience. “Who is he,” I questioned, “to tell me what I have or have not experienced in the time I’ve been on this planet?” He made me feel like I was listening to my mother.

“You’re dreaming,” my mother would say.

I had kind of liked writing poetry before that day. It lost some of its appeal as I sat and listened to him. Mostly I wanted to argue that he was pissing all over my poem. I understood at the time that maybe what he was really saying in a backhanded kind of way was that he was sorry I had that experience. He was trying to be protective, maybe even loving in his assessment. Instead I felt dismissed.

The image of the actual tree is etched in my memory. I remember the smell of the burned wood and the color of the carbon on my fingers where I touched the blackened trunk. The green leaves hissed as they blew in the wind and the undamaged part of the trunk was rough and grayish. “The park service will come in a few hours and cut this big fellow down,” my father said. “Too bad, this tree is over 200 years old.”

The poem? I don’t even remember the words, or the way I wrote about the event. I just remember the tree, black against the startlingly blue sky and the fluffy white clouds.

CHANGING THE PAST

Flower Beds
I read a new blog yesterday that a friend of mine has just started. It made me remember a few situations from my childhood that I still carry with me, where I wish I had been able to be more proactive. I look back and wonder sometimes what might have been different in that person’s life, not to mention my own, if I had actually intervened by saying or doing something. I understand that as a kid I was pretty powerless, but I still chastise myself every once in a while for not doing more.

One winter evening when all was dark outside the windows of the sunroom of my family’s house, I sat watching TV as I waited for my father to come home and my mother to finish fixing dinner. The memory is fixed enough in my mind for me to know that I was still in elementary school, and that probably it was a week night. “Wednesday” comes to mind when I pin down a day. I answered the phone when it rang from its perch on the top of the radiator cover next to me. It was one of my dear friends, a girl whose house was catty-corner to mine, a short trip around behind a couple of garages and into her yard instead of a long trip around the block by sidewalk. She was distraught as I had never heard her before.

“Please, Chrisy,” she sobbed. “Please can I come and spend the night at your house tonight? I don’t want to stay at my house any longer.” I remember thinking that the call was odd, and that because it was a week night it would be unlikely she could spend the night, but something about the urgency of her voice made me brave the rejection of my mother to ask anyway.

“Absolutely not,” my mother replied when I told her my friend wanted to come spend the night. My mother used the tone of voice that let me know there was no negotiating her response. I went with a heavy heart back to the phone to tell my friend she couldn’t come over.

“Please,” she begged again. “My parents are drunk and they are fighting. Can you come over here and spend the night with me, then? If you are here they won’t come in my room and scream at me.” I understood her desperation, suddenly. I would convince my mother to relent, and either way my friend would be with me, or I would be with her. I went back to the kitchen.

“Mom,” I said. “Please can’t she come and spend the night or can’t I go over there? Her parents are drunk and fighting and she’s scared.” I thought for sure if my mother understood the gravity of the situation she’d relent. I told her the truth of what I’d heard so that my mother would get it, too. We knew these people. They were neighbors and friends, adults, too.

“No.” she said. I was stung by her response. How could she not help my friend, I wondered. I felt terrible going back to that phone yet again to tell my friend no. I just didn’t get it. My mother never did offer any explanation.

One morning maybe a year later, after I’d left to walk to school, there was a terrible fire. My friend’s mother was drunk and had been smoking in bed. She set the bed on fire. “I thought it was the black maid they were carrying out,” my mother said as she told me the scenario of watching the fire department pull my friend’s mother out of the master bedroom window.

My friend moved away right after that. Her parents got divorced, the house was sold.

I saw her mother some months later in the living room of another mutual friend. “Hello, Chrisy,” she said to me as I walked in. I stared at her. She had on a brown wig. I barely recognized her, and I was horrified when I realized who it was. She was the first person I ever saw whose face had been horribly burned. She wore a short sleeved blouse and her arms were every bit as scarred as her face. I remember her skin being remarkably smooth for having been so damaged. I was frightened and relieved at the same time. Somehow I hadn’t believed she was still alive.

I saw my friend a few times after that. Her father stayed in the area though her mother had moved west. My friend came to visit her father in the summers. I was invited to spend the day with them every once in a while when my friend came. I remember driving around in a fancy convertible to the nearby beach. The car was very expensive. Once we went to the yacht club for lunch. Visits were few and far between.

The last time I saw my friend we were freshmen in college. We met for lunch at an old and famous diner not far from where we used to live. I was into Tarot Cards. She was into Jesus. “Those cards are an instrument of Satan, you know,” she said to me. “Please put them away.”

I don’t know what ever happened to her. I hope she found solace somewhere, and hopefully a family of her own, as far from the emotional space of her family of origin as possible. Would being able to come to my house that night have made a difference? Would it have helped to think she had a safe haven somewhere, anywhere? To this day, I think it might.

AN ENDLESS ENDING

Park Bench

Park Bench


I’ve been desperate lately to hear from other people who’ve gone through divorce. I have one close friend who went through the process of leaving a long term marriage about a year or so after I did. She leaned heavily on me for advice, and for someone to talk to about the things her then-husband did that no one who hadn’t gone through this would believe possible. It’s how we became really close, actually.

There is nothing like someone who understands. There is nothing like someone who can stand with you and tell you over and over, as many times as you need to hear it, that once you take all the emotion out of it, to the law the process of divorce is very cut and dried and isn’t all about extracting revenge no matter what it feels like. It’s even to your advantage, unless you have some really tricky property issues or stuff involving children that can’t be resolved any other way, to avoid court. That makes the lawyers rich and you might end up with dip squat anyway.

We’re the “little people” of this world, after all, not celebrities or children of trust funds. Not that either of us is remotely close to “poor.” There just comes a time when you realize it’s time to stop nickel and diming each other to death, and you put your emphasis on getting out with your soul as intact as possible. Whether you’ve been married a short time, or thirty years as I was, your heart gets ripped out and stomped into the ground and then eaten by coyotes or ants or the stray crow no matter what.

If I had realized what I’d have to go through to free myself of my husband, I might never have started. It was scary enough and took me a decade to do anyway. But one thing I do know. I wouldn’t be here if I had stayed. I would have hung myself in the closet, or put the straw in the vodka bottle and sucked it down until my liver gave out. The truth is I had to leave. Eventually, I chose life.

The only thing that still gets me is the realization of how little I understood some of the impact of my ex-husband’s childhood on who he was as a man. I knew him in high school, after all, though not as a boyfriend. I got to know his parents way better than I might ever have wanted to even before they were my in-laws. He was an only child in a violent, angry alcoholic home. It’s a wonder he could ever have been the sober, smart, creative, good provider and good father he was for years.

Eventually it all caught up with him. Eventually he couldn’t hold it together any more. Not that I was perfect in the midst of this, either. I’m not trying to say that I didn’t carry 50% of the blame for all that eventually occurred. I just chose to seek help, and keep on seeking until I realized my only option was to leave.

As an option, given who I am and the baggage I carry from my own childhood, that sucked. But it seemed better than staying. Especially since my two kids might think the marriage might be a model of a long-term relationship and what that looked like. That was the scariest part. What was the message I was sending my kids if I stayed?

I tried to talk to my husband about getting divorced when I finally made the decision to file and begin the process. For two years I had been telling him as clearly as I knew how that it wasn’t working for me, that I wasn’t happy, that we needed to try to implement some of the techniques that had been suggested to us in therapy. It fell on deaf ears. In the end I realized it never occurred to him that I’d really leave. So in his mind he never really needed to do anything.

“We’re getting divorced!” he shouted when I tried to talk to him about my reasons behind it as he sat on a couch across the room from me. “That means I never have to listen to you or care what you think again!” He jumped up off the couch, turned his back on me and walked out of the room. And so, basically, even when our kids’ welfare meant communication was vital or would help them if not us, his choice has been to pretend that I don’t exist, no matter who it hurts.

The great blessing for me is that I am finally getting to know who I really am. It’s taken five years but I am coming out the other side of this with a new found respect for my many gifts and talents. I love life in a way I never did before. I have a deep and abiding relationship with the God of my understanding. That deep down rage and fear that I stuffed my whole life is mostly gone. In case you care, I am living proof it really does get better with time. My grandfather said it best when he used to help me think about how to get through hard times. “You just have to keep on keeping on,” he would say.

I wish you the best on your journey, too.

So, if you’ve read this and you have any advice for me, or care to share a word or two about your journey or thoughts on this topic, please feel free to leave me a comment below. I promise I’ll at least think about what you’ve said. I can always use a companion on the path, especially when the going gets tough. Thank you.