Winds of Change

There have been times in my life, especially in recent years, when I have felt the beginnings of the winds of change at my back.  This is a subtle feeling, rather like seeing something in your peripheral vision, only to turn and not be able to see it.  Such has happened again recently.

I have homeschooled one of my granddaughters and she has done well, so well that this year she is working an above-grade curriculum. Our first day was yesterday and I was dismayed as I reviewed, at the gaps in knowledge she exhibited.  She can write better than most adults I know.  She can format her paragraphs with good topic sentences, good details, good conclusions.  I have taught her to think on paper.  That is what I value.

Yet yesterday, when she could not reliably identify the parts of speech (!) or the sentence subject/predicate, I was dumbfounded and not a little angry.  How can I have schooled this bright child for years, turning her into a skilled writer, and managed to miss such fundamentals?  She felt so bad she cried.

I made my lovely granddaughter cry.

Sigh.  And there is also the matter of my finances.  June wiped me out: a car repair, a broken TV, lost eye glasses, a waterheater replacement, and computer replacement.  Then in July the IRS billed me an additional $400 for last year's taxes.  All of which has left me without savings and facing property taxes.  Argh.

Then there is my book.  Only one of the four professionals to whom I have given it for review has gotten back to me.  Her review was encouraging but it is not enough.  Now I must noodle the others all the while I continue to research and write and also begin to seek a publisher.  And this is work that does not pay me a cent.

Toss in my inability to make pottery and my inability to pay for the surgery I need in order to get back to it, and I am left scratching my head.  Should I liqudate my pottery studio?  I have thousands of dollars in equipment and materials.  Should I leave my large home? Would I even be able to sell it?  And what then?  Move into some rental? How would that help?

Yes, it's getty breezy here.

Catching up with an old friend

Yesterday I had lunch with an old friend.  Maybe friend is too deep a word to describe our limited relationship, but we certainly are of like-mind on many things in life. So we met at a wonderful little natural food cafe and discussed our lives in some depth.

What struck me most about this was how fortunate I felt.  This lovely lady has been abandoned by her entire family and treated poorly.  It is clear that their recent attempts to contact her - after decades of neglect - were just to find out if she is still alive (she's a bit older than I) and maybe ingratiate themselves into her will.  I was horrified.

By contrast, I scrimped and saved to attend a recent conference and gave my credit card a workout paying for the airfare and hotel. When I returned home, I found out that my daughter had picked up my hotel tab! I have little to leave my family but they are active and supportive in my life.

I enjoyed my lunch with my old friend and hope we can get together more often.  Life is just too short for pettiness and acrimony.

Contentment examined

I have never been accused of being emotionally tone-deaf.  I know the full range of human emotion simply from living a full life. I know grief from the deaths of family and friends, some harder to bear than others.  I know joy and love from children, grandchildren and even my silly pets.  I have been enormously satisfied with some of my work and gratified that so much of what I set out to do in life - raising great kids, mastering pottery, writing - I have done. However, it is contentment I find most pleasing.

To be content is more than just being satisfied with things as they are.  To be sure, a certain lack of striving is key to it, but contentment does not rule out the continuing search for excellence, it just makes it more natural.  Contentment comes with a reassurance that one is on the right path, that one can meet whatever may come with equanimity, and that one is simply enough.

I think contentment, with the exception of infancy, is the province of later life.  Youth is too rushed, too worried, too full of ambition. When one is content, one might trade one's body for that of the younger self, but never the mind.  The lessons learned are too valuable, more precious than knees that work painlessly or unlined skin.

Contentment is full of acceptance - of those things missed as well as achieved.  It can acknowledge what might have been and see potential that might have been better used but rests easy in what is. It understands that the past are future are only versions of today.

There are those who have more than I, more money, more family, more friends, more success.  There are many who have less. Contentment has taught me to live without comparison.  For how does one compare the quality of the love one shares with that of another?  Contentment teaches comfort in one's own skin to such as extent that one can reside there without envy, bitterness, or fear.

Today I am content.

The way life leads

Every morning I go into my office and begin writing.  I work on my book about rare genetic disorders and on my blog about the same topic.  I find myself promoting others' work, their research, their endeavors, their papers.  I do this because life has led me down this strange path, away from commercially profitable writing and the pottery I love.

Lately my mind has wandered.  Somewhere amid the ATP energy production and substrate selection and all the different, horrible disorders, my mind is seeking clay.  My fingers can almost feel the moist, smooth, surface give as I turn it on the wheel in my mind.  I toy with the idea of hauling out a bag of clay and doing something, anything with it to scratch this itch.

But I don't.

There is the issue of my arm, which screams in pain just watching someone throw, and the pressing need to finish this book so I can move on.  What to, I have stopped trying to plan.  For plans are for fools.

So everyday, I snap on my office light, pull out my chair, and write.

What a long, strange trip it's been!

 I recently ordered refills for a little gizmo that clamps paper instead of stapling it.  I got it while working for FEMA in Mississippi in the wake of Katrina.  With it, I clamped copies of selected passages from a book I am writing on a class of rare genetic disorders. As I did so, I pondered the strange tangents my life has taken.

I have been, in turns, a wife and mother, a hippie, a potter, a reporter and editor, a Kelly Girl, an activist, a science writer, a divorcee, a grandmother, a homeschooler, a substitute teacher, a photographer, a homeowner, a hitchhiker, a cat lady and a dog owner, a carpooler, a grantwriter, a disaster worker, an ad writer, a novelist, a swimmer, a caretaker, a friend, unemployed, and now, a writer about genetics of all things!

At 20, one does not think one's life will take such diverse paths, and I know, for many, the road is rather straight.  For me, though, my paths have taken me to live in tiny cabins in the woods and in big city apartments, and to work among the poor, and to interview the rich in their fine environs - all the while struggling to raise two daughters, keep my sanity, pay my bills and be creative.  Yet somehow, here I am: in my own modest home with a few sheckles in my pocket and looking forward to a trip that is both business and pleasure.

I have been something of a generalist all my life.  I have made it my work to observe people.  I know what drives them.  I know how they think and what they want.  I know what pains them.  Yet here I am writing on a topic so specialized most people have never heard of it.  Somehow it seems fitting.

What a long, strange trip it's been!

Think differently about guns

I’m tired of the same old, same old.  I’m tired of second graders being killed in their classroom and dancing young people killed in clubs.  I’m tired of angry guys killing their partners. I’m sick to death of strutting fools intimidating people with guns in stores and on the street. And above all, I’m sick of ineffective discussion and political inaction.

It’s time to think differently.  Our right to bear arms is protected by the second amendment.  Fine.  I’ve lived with guns.  My father had a side arm; my husband had a handgun, my significant other has a couple of guns.  None of them walked around with them strapped on in plain view. None felt the need for an automatic or a semi-automatic gun. No one wants to eliminate the second amendment.  No one wants to go around collecting guns.

It is time to amend the second amendment for a new generation of Americans. We are no longer a few colonies without a strong national defense system.  In fact, we spend more than 50 percent of our national wealth on our military forces. We no longer have need of militias, well-trained or not.  If anything, our National Guard, Army Reserves, and the rest of our armed forces reserve corps take the place of citizen armies. That is not to say there is no place for an armed civilian.

The second amendment can still guarantee the right for citizens to own guns.  Not because we need to protect our towns from marauding invading foreign armies.  Not because we may need to rise up against our own government (that was never the intent and should not be now) but because we are a nation of farmers, sportsmen, mountain-dwellers, and urbanites, all of whom may want or need a gun for perfectly legal purposes.

No one wants your guns! 

What many of us do want is an amendment that reflects the reality of life in modern day America.  There are no militias.  We have weapons of mass destruction, not muskets.  We want to feel safe in our public places.  We want our children to be safe in their schools.  We want to dance and love and shop in peace. 

In the same way we want to keep alcohol away from children and cars away from drunk drivers, we want to make sure that gun purchases are fully vetted.  And gun ownership must come with responsibilities, such as insurance.  Gun owners should be licensed, insured, and subject to laws regarding the use of whatever weapon they choose to own.  And we should not be selling weapons that are made for warfare. No one has need of grenades, canons, rocket launchers or automatic weapons. 

Let there be due process but let there also be common sense.  If one has a violent history, or has criminal ties, severe mental illness, or has risen to the attention of national security, that person should be either entirely restricted from gun ownership, or be required to pass a higher level of competence to receive a license and insurance.  We take away the driving privileges of repeat offenders.  We should do the same with gun ownership.  It may be a right, but we can forfeit our rights with our behavior, as do those who lose their right to vote with felonies.

Our second amendment should continue to allow us the right to bear arms but temper that, not according to colonial militias, but according to real-time needs and modern sensibilities.  Specious arguments such as “It’s unenforceable because people will still get guns” are to be ignored.  We regulate all kinds of behavior that despite laws is still practiced.  We don’t make murder legal because we cannot stop all murders.  We don’t say shoplifting is fine because people will still shoplift.  No. We make common sense laws and enforce them.  We penalize those who break them.  We are Americans.  We can do this.  

Friendship

Unlike family, friends are voluntary, found along the path of life, identified though commonalities one might not even know one has.  Some friendship are rooted to a time of life or a job or some other transient period, known from the first as temporary.  Other friendships crash and burn or simply wear out.  Then there are those that are family, minus the genetics.

Mary Lou was such a friend to me.  We met at our jobs at a newspaper and found ourselves scheduling errands at the same time simply to continue our seemingly endless conversation.  She had two boys she was raising; I had two girls.  We ate breakfast biscuits together, shopped sales together, finally taking days at the beach together, burning our noses and drinking in the sun and sand.

My friend would shake both her hands, stopping mid-sentence, declaring  "Oh, oh, quantum leap!" and take our conversation in a new direction, only to return later to the thread with a bemused, "Now where were we?"

She doodled marvelous drawings, creating custom holiday greetings I wish now I had kept.  She understood me without explanation and loved me through some of my darkest days.  When she and her husband retired and moved to another state to live in the mountains, I saw her off.  I pulled up to the curb at her house and as her son and husband loaded a truck, she ran out to me with an old copper kettle she kept on her stove to moisten the winter air.  "Here," she said.  "For you."  We hugged and promised to visit.

Within weeks she was dead.  She had fallen down the steps of her new home.

Today I saw another friend off to yet another state.  We met more than 10 years ago in a small town in South Carolina at a pottery class.  Recognizing in each other that indefinable character that somehow creates friendship, we were delighted to discover we had grown up within a few miles of each other, both the daughters of eastern European widowed mothers. To our amazement we discovered we had been taken to some of the same performances at Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center in Manhattan. We shared memories of experiences lived separately but remembered together.

As my friend embarked on her adventure I wished her well and told her to travel carefully.  We will share lunches via Facetime and maintain our friendship, but I will miss her because I know that friendship is indeed rare and irreplaceable.  We met by chance and became the sisters neither of us had.