Moving

A friend sent me an essay written by the rector of her Episcopal church, an Advent Reflection. In it, the auther of the piece talked about a fall she recently took while running, and finding grace in having fallen. My friend sent it to me because I took a hard fall while running in early November, a little over a month ago. I hit the concrete pavement very hard, such that I gave myself a black eye and broke my radius at the wrist so badly I needed surgery to have it fixed with a titanium plate. 

Since being forced to work from home these past nine months due to the pandemic, I have put in hundreds, if not thousands, of miles walking and running all over Capitol Hill and its environs, discovering interesting little streets and byways I have never explored in the 29 years I've lived in this neighborhood, and, most joyfully of all, discovering the Anacostia Riverwalk Trail, both the east and west banks. It has called to me every morning since, and even when I've gotten a good five- or six-mile run in that day, it continues to call to me as I sit at my desk and work. 

 Then came my fall. 

 I took a two-hour walk this morning, and walked close to six miles.  I walked on the Anacostia Riverwalk Trail, the place where I have derived so much joy from running these past many months (not the concrete-paved stretch along the Navy Yard, where I fell).  As runners jogged past me, I wanted to call out to each and every one of them, "That was me too, just over a month ago-- I'm a runner too!"  But I didn't.  I had my trusty hiking staff with me, which I'm taking with me as a security blanket when I walk alone for the time being, until my wrist, my spirit, and my courage heal, but there were many stretches where I held it in the middle of the stick, swinging it freely, parallel to the ground, and not using it.   

My legs are a little stiff now from having walked so far after walking at most only a block or two at a time since I fell-- but the point is to keep moving, however I can.  Since aging is inevitable, and with it a certain amount of physical loss, however genetically gifted or mentally determined one may be, I guess there is grace in being made mindful of what I have and in getting the invitation to contemplate how I'll adapt to loss as I age. 

I took a quick trip to Whole Foods this morning (I have driven myself a couple of times this week, too!), and as I was getting into my car in the Whole Foods parking lot, a woman I know from St. Mark's, just a couple of years older than me and a former but long-time alto member of the choir, popped into my head.  She died of non-smoker's lung cancer just a couple of months ago.  The list of fellow altos, with whom I have spent so many delightful and inspiring hours, and who are no longer with us, ran through my mind:  Kitty D., Vicki S., Lee Ann S., Mal C., Suella H.... all but one were fairly close to my age.  I am here and they no longer are.  I thought, I can still sing on their behalf, but one day I'll join them.  Meanwhile, I am here, despite my screwed-together wrist, doing my best to keep moving.  

Connections, continued

I recently reconnected with an old friend with whom I had been out of touch for several years. After we had gotten in touch, she told me she googled me to see if I was still working at the same place, and found this blog. Her mention and praise of it sent me back to read my old posts, and I resolved to begin writing again on the one-year anniversary of my last post.

We reconnected on Facebook, of course—it’s the medium through which I’m now in touch with all kinds of people I once thought were lost forever to me. Before Facebook, many, many old friends, old lovers, old dorm buddies, people I knew intimately for 12 years or casually for 12 days, were simply out in the world somewhere, the silent, compliant blank screens on which I could safely and self-reinforcingly project all my fantasies about what might have become of them. They were frozen in time, the way I remembered them, the same age, with the same hairstyles, and biographies that stopped at the point we lost touch. Getting back in touch in a lot of instances has been a delight and a gift in ways that cannot be measured.

But am I the only one who has found this a little unsettling? There was a kind of wistful poetic distance in contemplating the Mr. Xs’ and Ms. Ys’ roles in my life, and wondering what had become of them, and whether they ever thought of me, and if so, how they remembered me. My relationship with this person or that person lived on only inside my own head, where I could justify the choices I made in the relationship quite neatly, with no reality to intrude rudely upon my contemplation.

But now…. You mean, that woman became a successful artist, who writes book, travels the world giving workshops, and has an avid following in her field? Gee, we both did that kind of artwork together when we knew each other, why didn’t I do that? You mean, that guy did eventually get married and is now happily ensconced in domesticity, surrounded by friends and family in a nice stable situation of a couple of decades’ duration? He was the last person I thought would turn out that way, so why did that not happen for me, with or without that particular guy? And come to think of it, on the other hand, she kind of does have a whiny quality that I had completely forgotten about, or somehow hadn’t really crystallized in my consciousness when we knew each other…. I see it now, and I see how it informed what became of our friendship. And that guy, now that I think back, did have that one little funniness about the way he carried himself that, if I had been more conscious at the time, would have predicted what he’s manifesting now. And how is this guy over here handling his inherent craziness in his current life? And wow, look at all those grandchildren. While I’ve been casting about trying to figure out what I want to be when I grow up, all these people have gone ahead and grown up.

They’ve always been out there in the world, whether I knew where they were or not, and we have always been connected, or else they would not have friended me, or responded positively when I friended them, even if we have not had much to say directly to each other individually since the day we friended. They played their role in creating who I am now, and I no doubt played a similar role in their life, even if only to give them an anecdote or two to tell at a party, or to share confessionally with their most intimate partner. Social network or psycho-spiritual network, we are connected. Always have been, always will be.

The Gift That Keeps on Giving

When I was in college, I took several courses in linguistics-- not because I needed it to support my (nonexistent) career plans, or as a requirement for my course of study, but because I found the subject interesting. For one course, I had a professor who was one of the editors of Webster's New World Dictionary. He was tall and thin, with angular features, a bushy head of salt-and-pepper hair and a very erudite manner of speaking. Let's call him Dr. G.

One day in class, at the front of the room where Dr. G could not ignore it, someone knocked over a cup of coffee, which proceeded to spill onto the floor right in front of him. Dr. G looked up and asked, in all seriousness, "Does anyone have any Kleenices?"

Now, to find that funny, you have to know that the plural of index is indices, and codex, codices, which obviously Dr. G knew (and I did too). I might add as a personal corollary that I have never heard the words indices, codices, or any similar word uttered aloud, even once, in my entire life.

Over 30 years later, it still never fails to make me laugh out loud (a smile and faint chuckle, that is) whenever I think of it. I don't remember what the class was about, but I will remember that question forever. Thought of it again today, when I ran out of Kleenices at my desk at work and had to go buy some. Thank you, Dr. G.

Reiki Dreams

It was a very eventful 2010, with a lot of challenges. One very positive thing that happened in my life is that I became a Certified Reiki Master Practitioner/Teacher. My Master's training took place late in the year, during a cold, hard-winded four-day retreat at Rising Phoenix, the Loyola College Retreat Center in Flintstone, Maryland, during which three celestial events happened concurrently for the first time in 372 years: the winter solstice, a full moon, and a lunar eclipse. This gave a powerful energy and sense of moment to the retreat, which I shared with two fellow students, fun and fascinating men named Carl and Rudy, and my teacher David.

On the first day of our Reiki Master's journey, David asked us to write a haiku about what we were feeling about our experience, to be shared the following morning. This opened a floodgate of haiku, and throughout the rest of the retreat they came, some humorous and some serious. Since it has been so long-- probably twenty years-- since poetry has come to me unbidden, I thought I would share my Reiki haikus with you here.

Silver moon and stars--
the female principle reigns.
Loving, caring, strong.

The Reiki Master
sings and chants her four smybols.
Energy flows free.

David, Rudy, Carl:
my winter solstice brothers.
Reiki unites us.

The food was fantastic at the retreat center, and one night at dinner, I composed this one:
The Reiki Master
licks his plate clean at each meal.
Loyola-- good food!

The retreat center has a huge fireplace in their central gathering/dining room, and throughout that cold, blustery long weekend, they kept it fed and glowing for us:
A log on the fire.
The fire in my heart grows strong.
Both are burning bright.

We titled this one "Pick-up Line at the Reiki Bar and Grill":
Hon-sha-ze-sho-nen
is my favorite Reiki symbol.
So, what's yours, baby?

How Lovely

Many, many times over the past few weeks, in many instances in my life—even at work—I have experienced a strong feeling that the only appropriate thing to say or do is to open my mouth and have Brahms’ How Lovely Is Thy Dwelling Place issue forth. Not just the alto line, but all the voice parts together, as if I were some super Tuvan throat singer and could sing all four vocal parts at once—with the orchestral score issuing from my throat as well. It has been almost a physical sensation, as if I am a channel, or a pipe which, if placed in the wind just so, would come alive with sound. Or maybe it’s as if I am a television that, if my antennae were placed just so to catch the wave, would spring into sound, color and narrative.

Saying the appropriate thing these situations has been a real challenge. If I am possessed in those moments, it is a wonderful possession. It feels as if it must feel to be standing on the edge of a cliff with arms outstretched and the wind blowing in the right direction, and wanting ever so badly to take off and fly—but maintaining just enough rationality to know that it wouldn’t happen, so best not to jump off, best not to open my mouth wide and wait for that fully formed music to come flowing out.

Do you think I’ve packed enough metaphors and similes into these scant paragraphs? Here’s one more: Though it’s not issuing forth from my mouth, the music lives inside of me, and I ride it like an eagle riding a thermal.

Enthroned in Majesty

The week of my father’s funeral, my cousin Sandy had cooked us a Thanksgiving dinner and brought it to my mother’s house, where we were all staying. Thanksgiving was about two weeks away, and Sandy, in an act of caring and generosity that is typical of her, thought since we probably weren’t going to be together on the actual feast day, we should be able to share a meal of thanks while we were all together.

We prepared the table as for a normal Thanksgiving meal, and sat arrayed around the table. Although I grew up Catholic, ours was not a terribly observant family, and we never normally said grace before a meal—except on Easter, Christmas, and Thanksgiving. As we sat there about to begin the meal, the question arose, who was going to say grace? My brother Mark suggested I say it, as I was the only child who regularly attended church. I said, “No, I think Ma should say it.” And so it was.

My parents had been divorced some 39 years before, and it was an ugly divorce, in which the fighting and strife had dragged on for years. While my father had gone on to create a second family with a second wife, my mother, although pretty, sociable, and popular, had never remarried, despite several opportunities to do so. There were many reasons for that (most stingingly, “no one wants to marry someone with four kids”), but at heart it was because she was a one-man woman, and married the man she had wanted to be married to for life in 1948. Over the years they would see each other from time to time, mostly when it had to do with one of us, but as they aged they saw each other less and less. At the time of my father’s death, my mother had not seen him for many years, and knew of his growing infirmity only through the reporting of her kids.

She began the prayer stiffly—although she had been Catholic by choice from the age of 21, she had not been raised in any religion, and was not a natural at acts of worship—and duly thanked God for the presence of her kids at the table. Then she paused, and unrelated to any sentence that I had heard her begin, said, “Walter’s death,” and began crying. My mother was not an easy crier. Her crying always sounded strangulated somehow, and to break down and cry at the head of the table at which she was formally speaking to God, surrounded by her silent children and their significant others, was not something she felt comfortable doing. My brother Mark quickly began speaking over her tears, partially to comfort her but also I think to get past the awkward, sad and painful moment. He was sitting next to me, and I kicked him. I thought she should experience the grief that I knew she must have been feeling, but had not yet expressed or maybe even felt, caught up as we all had been in the drama of either standing by and witnessing as the funeral preparations had been made, or participating in them from off stage left (that week my mother had even forwarded a suggestion through an intermediary—me—to her formal rival to help enable her to get a payment of some sort from the VA). Quietly, she cried. Quietly, we let her. Eventually someone stood up and walked to where she sat to comfort her, the moment passed, my mother mastered her grief, and we went on with dinner.

I’ve heard those words in my head, “Walter’s death,” often in the years since then. My mother never called my father Walter. She mostly called him Walt (or in the early years, Wally or even, when they were feeling especially playful, Waldo). To us, she always called him Your Father (she even called him Your Father once or twice when talking to one of our spouses, so used as she was to calling him that). But at that table, she wasn’t talking to her kids—she was talking to God. And to her that meant that she had to be formal and well-behaved, like putting on your best clothes to go to church. To her that meant that she had to be at her best, as if she were visiting a rich uncle whom she saw seldom, but knew she was obligated to impress. She might even have been slightly embarrassed at breaking down and crying in front of God.

She had told me toward the end of her life that she wasn’t very big on the external formalities of churchgoing, but, she said with conviction, “I believe.” I’ve thought a lot about that “Walter,” and it tells me that to my mother, God was transcendent, and not immanent. God was not there with her, familiar with the intimate details of her life, but was away from her, up there somewhere, enthroned in majesty.

A Stirring Memory

My mother took cream and sugar in her coffee, and she had a way of stirring her coffee that was unique to her. As she would rotate the spoon circularly through the cup, she would clink the spoon against the side of the cup three times, in a triangular fashion, for each rotation of the spoon around the inside of the cup. It was as if she didn't feel the coffee was being truly and properly stirred unless that spoon clinked against the inside of the cup in just the right way. I can hear the music of her coffee-stirring right now, as I write this.

It's funny how a person lives on in such inconsequential memories, ones that can be prompted by the simple act of making myself a cup of tea in the middle of my work day.

The Blizzard of 2009

There’s something about a heavy snowfall that puts you in the realm of the eternal. Today in Washington, we experienced a record-breaking snowfall, and the snow is now, at 11 PM on Saturday evening, hip deep in many places. I went out and shoveled at around 10 AM, figuring it’s easier to shovel seven inches at a time than 25 or so all at once, but didn’t get out again until about an hour ago. I’ve been holed up in my den, working on a power-point presentation I’ll have to give at work on Tuesday. Work has been very tough lately (I’ll spare you the details, but will instead refer you to a single line of voiceover narration describing the life of George Bailey: “Potter was bearing down hard.”), and it’s been a season of sadness for me. Between bouts of power-pointing, I’ve spent time on the phone with my sweetheart and two of my sibs, and of course communing with my favorite boy, Murphy.

But then I went outside. It’s quiet and peaceful, and everything is still. The snow is sparkly, and I saw only a few people walking down the middle of the street. I pushed the snow off my car, did a little more shoveling (my 20-something neighbor did our whole section of the block around dinnertime, bless him), and then just stopped. What a gift it is to be outside at night in the snow. I looked back at my house, and it looked like a place of light and warmth and safety.

3326
One year during the Christmas season, when I was a teenager, we experienced a heavy, sparkly snow in Parma not unlike this one. Unlike now, I lived in a house full of people, with my brothers, sister and mother. There was always a lot going on and, more often than not, the TV was blaring. This particular night, as the family sat around the living room and the kitchen, kvetching, talking, doing whatever it was we normally did, I put on my coat and went outside. Like now, the ground was covered with snow, which was still falling. I walked down the driveway away from the house and sat on the back fender of Mom’s car. Though when I looked over my shoulder, the Christmas tree and the life within the living room were visible in the picture window, not a sound could be heard from inside the house. Outside it was silent, save for one thing: up on the hill, some family was piping Christmas music out into the night. It was played with bells, a pure and simple arrangement—no chords, just the simple one-note-at-a-time melodies of one wonder-filled contemplative song of the season after another. No one was outside on the street but me.

That moment sealed itself in my heart forevermore. I was out in the night, feeling the presence of God herself, helped by the soft Christmas music that in the happiest of times sets up a vague sense of longing in one’s soul, and behind me, in that house, were my people-- those with whom I shared my daily life and without whom, despite the seemingly unmitigated fractiousness of the relationships, I would have been lost. Right there inside that little glowing box known as 3326, stood the Christmas tree and all I knew or had of family, at least in a day-in and day-out sense. They were so solid, so real, such a pain in the ass, and so essential to my being. Of course, what I felt most consciously at the time was that I was apart from them, and the kind of person who spiritually belonged outside in the dark, sitting in the cold and beautiful snow, having God’s music piped into my soul—or maybe it was coming from inside me, and I just thought it was coming from up the hill….

But what I know now is that I was blessed to have them, and although we’re all outside in the dark within ourselves, experiencing the wonder of being, knowing there’s a warm, bright place wherein our people reside and are ready to welcome us back in-- indeed, may not have even noticed we were gone—is a gift that I for one treasure, and try to remember especially in these difficult times.

Tonight, when I looked back at my house, I was pleased to see that I had created for myself, my kitty, and all my loved ones who enter, a place of warmth and light and shelter from various kinds of storms, however pretty (or petty) some of them may be. And though this night there is no Christmas tree and I am here alone with the Murphster, I know all those loved ones, wherever they are, living or dead, are with me here.

I went back into the house and got my camera. When there’s a good snowfall, I always get the idea to take a really nice shot of the house with the intention of maybe creating a photo Christmas card the following year. I have yet to do that, but I did take a shot or two. I want to post one here, but Blogger's photo upload doesn't seem to be working for me right now. Oh, well, I'll try again tomorrow....

Free-form Writing

Tonight I’ll do an exercise in free-form writing. I could come up with many different subjects to write about, but I want to just open the conduits. On Sunday an obituary caught my eye. It was about a 45-year-old woman who died of a brain aneurysm, and who recently had an essay published in the literary magazine Shenandoah. The obituary also made mention of Gettysburg Review. So I looked them up on the internet and discovered, or rediscovered, the world of small-press literary magazines. I remember them from college, or particularly well-stocked newsstands, and have looked through them on occasion, but never really picked one up and read it carefully. Reading the submission requirements on some of them, you can tell that tons of people are hopefully submitting their most heartfelt writings, and the people who read the submissions have had to slog through what they have felt was a lot of crap. Reading that none of them accept anything that’s been published in any medium made me feel like, oh shit, I’ve already put my best stuff on my blog, and used up some of the subjects that I feel the impulse to write about most strongly, and now I’ll have to scrape up other stuff if I have any hope of being published in a literary magazine. What if my well is about to run dry? The obituary said this woman’s essay in Shenandoah, titled "Ugly", about her having felt unattractive her whole life, garnered calls from a couple of literary agents wanting her to write a book. Wow, I thought.

But the thing is, this is kind of what I envisioned happening when I started my blog. I figured somewhere in the back of my head, and maybe not so far in the back-- but it was never the main thing-- that my blog was going to get attention from someone who would want to publish my writing in some more permanent form. But the doing the blog is itself the act of publishing it in a pretty permanent form. It could be that only seven people have read it—other than myself—but the impetus for writing it is the act of testifying to what it means to be human in the world-- one person’s experience in the 20th and 21st centuries. To say, I was here, I lived, and I experienced these things. If anyone at all reads them and is moved to laugh or cry (a lot more crying, I am guessing and have been told, than laughing—at this point, anyway), then it has been worth doing and I can die knowing I’ve accomplished what I set out to do. The sense of satisfaction I get when I feel I’ve expressed myself well is real and profound.

But it would be nice to get some sort of offer from the larger world, wouldn’t it? On days when work is particularly hairy and unpleasant, like the past couple of days (not coincidentally, right after getting the literary magazine idea), I walk around the office thinking how great it would be for all the people on my floor, including all those who are in the wordsmithing and publishing business to hear, oh, did you know that Cher Stepanek, who works over there in that department, has a book coming out? Wow, she writes? Why, The Big Boss asks, isn’t she working for me in some literary capacity? Why have we not recognized her talents; why have we been letting her languish in Department X?

It’s what everyone wants, isn’t it? We are all walking around knowing deep in our bones we’re special, we have something wonderful about ourselves that none of the people we see and interact with every day knows about. Wouldn’t it be great, we think, if one day they realized who we really are? Wouldn’t it be great if they found out, too, that we have this secret life in which our talents are well developed, well realized, and recognized by this whole huge group of others, yet somehow they, the people we see and interact with every day, have missed it? To be recognized as special: it’s what we all want, and I want it too. That is aside from the impulse, and I want to call it a purer impulse, to say what I want and need to say, to put it out there for (theoretically) all the world to see on the internet, and then go about my life not really tracking who is actually seeing it. I'm thinking that maybe it’s kind of an adolescent wish, that need to be recognized as special. It’s the wish of someone who has not yet learned or realized their own best way of making their mark in the world. Or maybe it's one of the stigmata borne by children of divorced parents. Or maybe it’s universal, but people just stop admitting it, or get too beaten down to remember they felt it.

I have set my self this evening the task of writing for fifteen minutes nonstop, and am almost finished. There, it’s done.

3326

What the Light Would Do, Part III
Kitchen, Late Afternoon/Early Evening
The kitchen in the house I grew up in had two windows. One faced north and the other faced west. Although the house was built as a part of a 1950s post-war tract housing development, each of the nearly identical houses was set a little forward or back of the house next to it. Because of this, the kitchen was directly exposed to the setting sun, and in the late afternoon or early evening, strong western light would enter in through the window over the sink and fill the kitchen with a red-gold glow. The sun shone directly onto the kitchen table, and unless your back was to the window, it would be in your eyes. My mother would often draw the shade on that window in the evening, but I always liked the kitchen best when it was ablaze with evening sun, even if blinded me and made it uncomfortable to see and interact with other people at the table. Somehow the western sky and the golden glow made the kitchen feel a part of something large and dramatic and expansive. It signaled, too, that a large part of the day’s activities had been completed (successfully, satisfyingly), yet the greater part of the evening was yet to come, and there was still time to drink deeply of this day.

In that western window, the proverbial window over the sink, my mother had a few potted plants. The window sills were not very deep, so they were of necessity small plants in small containers. The cast of characters on that window sill changed a little over the years, but there were three or four plants that made their home on that window sill for a long, long time. The younger of my two brothers was born in 1957, and as a new baby gift, a friend had given my parents a cute little ceramic planter shaped like a telephone, containing a small, short-variety sansevieria. The volume of this planter had to be no larger than that of your average bone-china teacup—but that snake plant sat on that window sill in that planter for 48 years, growing the entire time. The planter did not even have a drainage hole, and at some point after the first decade or so, I’m sure the soil, or what was left of it, became completely depleted. But there it grew. At the time my mother moved, in 2005, there were two other snake plants, of the taller variety, that had probably inhabited that sunny window sill for a couple of decades at least, along with a tired-looking purple tradescantia.

A month or two after my mother passed away earlier this year, I took a deep breath and repotted those four plants. I selected beautiful purple, periwinkle, aqua and green planters, shocked the heck out of the plants by removing them from their too-tight but very broken-in shoes, and potted them up with fresh soil and plenty of room to grow. Having no properly sunny window sills that would accommodate them at home, I’ve taken them to my office. I have a northern exposure there, but the building is skewed to the west just enough so that at this time of year, the setting western sun comes streaming in. After a few weeks of confusion, the plants have begun to get used to their new home and green up. There are new leaves on all of them (the contents of the little telephone planter having been split into three separate but color-coordinated pots), and sometimes they seem to be smiling as they bask in the deep golden setting sun. I love looking at them, because they remind me of that kitchen, and because they speak of longevity and survival. At the close of the work day, when the sun is filling the back of my office with strong, golden light, I remember what the late afternoon and early evening was like in Parma Ohio, in a kitchen that seemed a part of something large and dramatic and expansive. It feels good to know it’s the same sun, shining on the same plants. I wonder how long they’ll be in this set of pots.

Winter in August

Summer has finally kicked in in earnest here in Washington, but today I’m thinking about a moment in time deep in the middle of a Cleveland winter in my very early childhood. We had recently moved to 3326. Although I don’t remember the year, or exactly how old I was, it must have been sometime during the winter spanning 1956/57. The snow was heavy on the ground, and it was after dark. Our family had a sled with a removable upright back and sides, so that small children could sit supported in the sled and be pulled with the long loop of rope that was affixed to the sled’s front. The younger of my two younger siblings, both brothers, had not yet been born or was too young to participate, and so it came to pass on this particular snowy evening that my parents piled my sister (the oldest, and heading up the back of the sled), me (in the middle, acting out in real time and space the role of middle child), and then my brother (in front of me, smaller and nestled against the front of my puffy gray and navy snowsuit) into the sled for a ride around the neighborhood.

It was cold and dark, but only as dark as it can be with the ground completely white and streetlamps shining their light on the soft sparkly snow. My father, wearing a formal man’s overcoat, thick leather gloves and no hat, pulled the sled out into the driveway and down the apron to the street. I marveled at how big and strong he was—it seemed unfathomable that he could pull a sled with three people in it. He was my father. He was big and strong and capable. He would take care of me as I felt my sister hug me and as I hugged my brother, snugly tucked into our warm clothes and the safety of the guard-railed sled. The world was cold and icy, but a place of wonder nonetheless. The street was quiet, and there were no cars on the road this evening—the snow must have been so heavy that day that it drove everyone inside and kept them there. My father pulled the sled into the street, where passing cars had earlier packed the snow into slicker, smoother, and icier tracks on which to pull the sled. Keep your hands inside, kids, he said, we’re going for a ride! He began to run, pulling the sled behind him. He seemed very far away, since he was so tall and far from the ground, compared to my small huddled nearness to all that snow and ice, close enough to touch if I had not heeded my father’s warning to keep my hands tucked in and safe. The windows in the houses we passed on either side of the street glowed from within. Whatever sounds there might have been in the larger world were muffled, as they are in a heavy snow, and all I heard was the smooth sound of our sled runners moving over the packed snow and my father’s crunchy steps as he ran. He would slow to a brisk walk from time to time, both to catch his breath and to see how we were faring in our sled. I could see his breath escaping in cloudy puffs as he looked back at us. Before long, he’d run again. He pulled us all around the block, running most of the way to make sure we had the most fun possible. I hoped it would never end.

I have not made a list of the happiest moments of my life—I’m not the kind of person who makes lists like that, and I would hate to rank those moments. Nevertheless, even though I was no more than four years old when it happened, that ride around the block is right up there with the top ten.

The Rainbow Ballroom

I took the day off from work last Monday, the day after my birthday. It was partly to give myself a day away from the grind, and partly to spend the day handling some paperwork regarding my mother’s estate, Monday’s bit being the most complicated piece thus far. On my way to visit with the financial advisor who’d be helping me with the documents, I found myself thinking again of my mother’s last months, and running through the decisions that were made along the way. I know that what was done was done, and all was exactly as it needed to be for whatever mysterious karmic reasons there may be for these things, but in my worse moments I find myself second-guessing decisions I made or participated in. Did I absolutely do everything I could? Did I ask the right questions; hold enough of the right medical personnel accountable? Would she still be here if I had not recommended and advocated a move to a safer environment, closer to me? As the internal torture session began, I came to a moment when I thought, no, you can’t go through this again. This must stop at some point. That’s when I made a decision.

Lately I’ve had occasion to think about the Rainbow Bridge, since both my sister and cousin have mentioned it in relation to Murphy’s condition. It’s a place we can imagine our departed companion animals, whole and happy again. So right then and there while walking down the street, I founded the Rainbow Ballroom. It’s a place where my mother is young and dancing, where the room is full of dance partners, and every one is a man who knows how to dance, and who is imbued with the qualities of tenderness, light-heartedness, constancy and loyalty, who means what he says, doesn’t say anything he doesn’t mean, and keeps his promises. Each one vies for her hand, and her heart is open to them. Every evening there is a dance, and every evening she’s there, dancing the tango, the rumba, and all those other dances she used to try to teach me in our kitchen when I was a kid. When she’s not at the Rainbow Ballroom, she may be in the Rainbow Rehearsal Room, working out the steps to a new routine or teaching the hopelessly klutzy to be as graceful as she. Or she may be on stage at the Rainbow Theatre, in the world’s most precise chorus line, kicking high or doing the soft shoe with hat and cane. Other times, she’s at the Rainbow Folk Festival, in full Ukrainian regalia, her thick and shiny brown hair bouncing softly and loosely as she dances. She is smiling. She’s the greatest among all the great dancers there, and she’s laughing with delight. Some evenings at the Rainbow Theatre, she’s the featured singer, and her most famous numbers are Besame Mucho and I Wish I Knew, the A and B sides of a record she cut in a penny arcade as a young woman, full of hope and promise. Roses are thrown at her feet, thousands cheer, and she owns the town.

So as of today, no more will I see her in her bed in Room #65 at the rehab center. From now on, she’ll be dancing at the Rainbow Ballroom.

Keeping On

This afternoon I came upon check registers from a bank account my mother had from 1988 until she moved from Parma to Maryland, in 2005. In 1988 she would have been 66 or 67 years old, and still six or seven years from retirement. I see her paycheck deposits from that time, and I note the progression of her income in the raises she received over the years as the amount of these deposits steadily rose. I wonder what these paychecks would be worth in today’s dollars. I find out for the first time that The Cutting Room is name of the salon at which she’d get her hair done every week with religious regularity. I track the mergers and acquisitions of the supermarket chain she patronized, as the name she wrote on her checks for groceries changed at least twice during that time. I note with a smile that the spouses of children received the same amount of Christmas money in their checks as the actual biological children, but long-time unmarried life partners, such as Alex, were discounted some 40%. No surprise there—despite being divorced, my mother proclaimed wholeheartedly her belief in marriage. I fast forward to the later years, and I see the handwriting grow tiny and shaky, a terrible graphic testament to the Parkinson’s that robbed her of her vigor and eventually her life.

She was diagnosed with Parkinson’s in 2004, but she had confided to me a year earlier that she suspected she had it. It took her almost two years of doctor visits before any doctor was willing to make that diagnosis. These check registers show that she had it as early as 2001, and possibly sooner. I wonder if any of her doctors at the time had asked to see her handwriting. I wonder that I did not notice it on the random birthday card or Christmas card and hear an alarm bell—not that early detection would have cured the condition or even slowed its progression. The small, shaky script has been very hard for me to look at without a stab of pain since I first noticed it. Nevertheless, these check registers also give testimony to the fact that she soldiered on, despite all. I think I’ll keep them for now.

An Inexact Science

It’s an inexact science, this sorting through my mother’s stuff, trying to decide, or to feel, what to keep and what to let go. Here’s a box full of almost nothing but greeting cards. Some have photos inside, and some of the photos feature my mother. Those I’ll keep, of course. What about the cards that held them? Cards are manufactured things, but they all have personal greetings, some long and heartfelt, others seemingly perfunctory. And some are more than 50 years old. I’ve been around archivists enough to know that paper ephemera say something meaningful about the material culture of our time to scholars and historians, so the old ones, I’ll keep—but if kept long enough, they will all one day be old.

What to do with all those signed cards? How many Christmas cards over how many years are sufficient for me to memorialize that my mother lived through many Christmases, and shared the joy of each with her friends and family? Is the measure of any one card’s value how much the sender meant to my mother, or to me? If there are many cards from a given party, does any one of their cards have lesser value than a card signed by someone who only sent her a card once in her life, or more? What about the card she sent to her friend of over 80 years that was returned to her, because the friend’s son had her transferred to another care facility and failed to notify his mother’s gal pals of her whereabouts? That returned card is in there too, and tells a story that was decades in the making and ended sadly, with neither friend knowing what eventually became of the other. How can I simply trash it?

I sift and I sort, saving some and deciding some will go into the recycling, with a silent affirmation that they will no doubt be turned into more greeting cards that someone in the future will send, receive and cherish. I encourage myself to get rid of as many as possible, because, after all, they are only greeting cards. Some I can’t yet jettison. Why? I don’t know. Perhaps in time the energy I feel as I hold and read them will lessen, and they too will have their substance sent back into the moving stream of sentiments that is the recycled greeting card industry, or be turned into wonderful, life-changing books, or common everyday printer paper. I can’t say why I choose to keep some and let go of others. Every one that I let go of lightens the burden of stuff, but shrinks the evidence of my mother’s participation in the rituals of day to day life. It’s an inexact science, this sorting through my mother’s stuff.

Our Infinite Perfectibility/Our Perfection

Alex and I had lunch with a very dear friend today. Jan has a special relationship with Murphy (he put a major hole in her leg during his early years, when he was still learning how to be civilized), and she wanted to visit him. Over lunch, as usual, we talked about our work, our personal lives, the ongoing health care debate, the health of the society and the planet, our progress through life, and what sort of response is called for by the times we live in. I came away with a clearer sense of where I am in my world and how I’m going to tackle the issues that are facing me now, mostly with respect to Murphy’s care. I also came away with a deep appreciation of my friend Jan and the way she has supported me, and allowed me to support her, through all the years that I’ve known her.

After I arrived home and said my goodbyes to both Jan and Alex, I turned my attention to the boxes of stuff I brought home from my mother’s apartment last spring, determined to make good on my resolution to work through them by the end of summer. I spied one that I knew contained the contents of an end-table drawer in her living room. Good, I thought, that one will be easy. It doesn’t contain anything too personal or too emotionally fraught. Sorting through it, I’ve found maps (over a dozen road maps of Ohio, and a healthy representation of each state in which her children live); more decks of cards than I ever knew she had, including a couple that I vividly remember playing with; two sets of coasters that must have been the fruits of under-$5.00 gift exchanges at work; and many, many brochures, booklets and articles cut from newspapers about high blood pressure, osteoporosis, eating right, exercise, local programs for seniors, herbal and holistic remedies, personal finance, and home improvement. That was my mother. She never stopped looking for new ways to get better and be better. There wasn’t a newspaper article about health and fitness-- including financial fitness and house and garden fitness-- that ever escaped her attention. She never lost her essentially optimistic belief or interest in the perfectibility of the human enterprise, and she never stopped trying to attain that perfection—even if her effort sometimes went no further than cutting and saving the information. The contents of the box may not have been very personal or emotionally fraught, but they brought home one aspect of Vicki Stepanek that I knew very, very well.

I smile because, seeing my mother’s better living archives so soon after sharing a heartfelt powwow on life over lunch with people I love on a perfectly archetypal late July day, I know that she didn’t have to strive so hard for that perfection. None of us do. We are perfect just as we are.

Connections

Spring has given way to high summer, and although this July is cooler than normal, the weather leaves no doubt that we are moving further away from that cruellest month with every week that goes by. In recent weeks I have made major changes to my little backyard garden, entertained my visiting Brazilian goddaughter, and hosted my sister on a couple visits to my place, one to accompany me to an appointment with an estate attorney. I’m sure I’ll say more about these things in later entries, but I’m thinking about my cat Murphy today. This morning I took him to a veterinary ENT specialist. He’ll be having a CT scan and surgery tomorrow for an obstruction in his nasal cavity or nasopharynx, and the vet prepared me for fact that it might very possibly be a malignant tumor. Certainly, we’ll deal with that once we know for certain if that’s the case, but for now I feel immense relief that he will finally be getting some effective help and, whatever else comes of this, will be breathing more easily once he recovers from the surgery.

I am thinking about a moment of realization I had a few months after I moved into this house. Before becoming a homeowner, I had been living in a two-room apartment, had been catless for two and a half years, and was not in a relationship. Then I bought this house. I moved in the first weekend of May, and by late winter, early the following year, I had acquired Murphy as well as a tenant for my spare bedroom and her cat, and had begun to date Alex. I clearly remember one night during a severe thunderstorm when Alex was visiting, which meant I had two humans and two cats under my roof as well as myself. I lay awake listening to the wind beat against the house and rattle the tin roof, thinking to myself with amazement, I have a houseful of people and animals for whom, since they are all in a house I own, I am responsible. Less than a year earlier, I was a woman about whom it could be said that if I had disappeared on a Friday evening, there would have been a good chance no one would have known about it till I failed to show up at work the following Monday morning. No cat, no boyfriend, no roommate, no roommate cat, no house, no one and nothing for whom to be responsible; no front-line, day-in-and-day-out connections in this world at all. Anyone whom I loved or who loved me, far away and taking care of themselves. Perfect freedom.

It’s been a rough road watching Murphy get sicker despite visits to two other vets before this, and struggling to get him to swallow any number of pills, powders and drops, when all I would have hoped to do with Murphy at this point in this challenging year is play with him, snuggle with him, and watch him tussle with his buddy Lucky. Loving and taking care of people (and I count Murphy as one of my people) is hard work, and I’ve had my share of watching people go off their food for one lifetime in this year alone. Murphy has been at Alex’s place for the past few days, and I’d be lying if I said not having to listen to him struggle for breath since Sunday has enabled me to calm down a bit and rather enjoy some inner and outer quiet. But of course I wouldn’t trade that connection, as heartbreaking as these connections inevitably are, for all the quietude in the world. There may be freedom in being unconnected by bonds of loving obligation to other living things, in not having the responsibility for anyone or anything other than oneself, but having experienced that, I’ll take this, thank you.

3326

What the Light Would Do, Part II
Bedroom, Evening
As the sun would fade from the sky at the end of the day, I would sometimes look out my upstairs bedroom windows to the east. Our street and the several parallel streets adjacent to it ended in a big woods with a deep ravine and stream running through it. Looking out that east window in the evening, I could see past the woods, some half mile down the street, to the lights of the greater metropolitan area beyond. They sparkled in the distance. I knew, of course, what lay in the immediate vicinity in our suburb and our part of the county. I knew also what lay beyond: the big cosmopolitan cities of the east, foremost among them New York, and beyond that, the ocean and Europe. (They danced in my imagination like the magical city of F. W. Murnau’s Sunrise.) I would feel so small and inadequate looking out that window, so unequal to the task of meeting head on what lay out there to the east, my future. I somehow knew or felt in my bones that those big cities out there along the Atlantic coast were the places where futures were regularly made or broken. How did Dickens put it? “Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life…” That’s what I wondered as I looked to the east. Would I ever win the riches and glory that I knew could be had out there? Was I up to the task? How was one to begin trying? Would I even know what the real rewards of a life well lived were when I saw them? Looking back, I seemed convinced that these wonderful things lay to the east, but now I wonder if I only felt that way because that happened to be the view on which my windows opened. Would I have invested Canada with the keys to the mystery of my future had my windows faced north?

Through happenstance, I came to live in Washington DC, the capital of the free world, and live there now. I have spent a respectable amount of time in New York, and have successfully conducted business there. I am at an age where in any generation prior to my own, my best years would be said to be behind me. While I know that this magical place where the riches of life can be mine is within me, yet somehow I feel I never made it to that east of my childhood. Maybe that’s because by the time I got to where I thought I wanted to go, I had changed so completely that the me who wanted to go there no longer existed to realize she had arrived. Or maybe the end point keeps moving. Or maybe because that magical place is inside, those things I hoped to achieve there, and the recognition I hoped to gain, are not and cannot be bestowed or claimed in any externally visible or measurable way.

It would be nice to be able to stand over the shoulder of that girl looking out that window and tell her simply to enjoy the journey, that there’s nothing to fear and nothing to “achieve” that she did not already possess. I wonder if she would have done anything differently. I doubt it.

Moving

My office will be moving at the end of next week. Since I began working at this place over 16 years ago, this will be the fifth space we’ve inhabited, and even if I’ve liked the space I’m in, as I do now, I always look forward getting a new work space. It feels like a new beginning, and even though I’ll be doing the same job and working on the same projects, it’s a nice time to say to myself, here is an opportunity to start fresh and approach my work with new resolve. We have already been given the keys to our new offices, and today, a relatively quiet Friday, I began moving some of my stuff to the floor below, into my new office. It’s nice to envision how productive I’ll be in the new space, and how clean and neat I’ll always keep it. I plan on softening the look of my office by adding a textile wall hanging and some trailing plants, like maybe a pothos near the window, which I envision growing with great lush profusion. Even though the new office is smaller and less sunny, I can’t wait for the new chapter in my work life to begin.

It’s a little sad, though, because I will never again spend my days sitting in that other office, where I so often talked to my mother on the phone, and so often talked to the health care providers who took care of her in her final months. Leaving that space means leaving that time, and moving further into the future and away from when I last saw and spent time with her. It makes me recall when I was living in a rented apartment on A Street, and my cat Libby died. Only a week or so later, my refrigerator konked out and could not be fixed, and instead of paying my rent that month, I went out and bought a brand new refrigerator. It was empowering, because my landlord was cheap, and normally obtained his appliances from some shady fellow who “reconditioned” old discarded ones and placed them in his rental units, often complete with a portable infestation of cockroaches. But that month, instead of sending him a rent check, I sent him the receipt for the fridge—and never heard a peep of protest from him. It should have felt great. Instead, it highlighted for me the fact that I could not hold back time, that I would be experiencing that brand new refrigerator without Libby, and thus would be beginning the part of my life that would go on without her.

Maybe it’s weird to compare the loss of my mother to the loss of my cat, but I think you know what I’m getting at. I kind of understand the impulse of those people you hear about who, after the loss of a loved one, never touch a thing in that person’s bedroom again. It doesn’t bring them back, though, and life does go on. What it says to me is that every day we are leaving the past behind and every day we can embrace fresh new beginnings—but perhaps we only really notice it when a goodbye and a hello happen at around the same time.

Even though my new office is smaller, it is configured differently, and is yielding up new places to hang pictures and place small decorative items designed to delight me as I move through my work day. I’ve thought about some of the photos of my mother as a beautiful young woman, and some even older archival items from my grandparents, that are among my mother’s effects, and I’m thinking maybe I’ll frame some of them. They’d look great next to that poster I have, circa 1917, exhorting new Clevelanders to come to the public schools and learn the language of America. Having those images in my office will remind me of who I come from, will make me smile, and will strengthen and nurture me. Even if I will never have spoken to my mother on the phone in my new office, I can bring her with me there, in those photos and in the heart of who I am every day.

Simple Gifts

A friend of my mother’s sent her a CD for Christmas. Lord knows where she got it—it has no production information, no songwriting or performing credits, and is in a simple bifold card stock sleeve with a generic hazy photo of something green and uplifting on the cover. On the Sunday after Christmas, I had spent the entire day with my mother, and was ready to be on my way, but she wanted to listen to her new CD. I looked at it, and it seemed suspiciously “Christian” to me, in the way that is meant by the phrase “contemporary Christian” when used in reference to pop music. We had had a full day, with an outing at the movies and dinner afterwards, but something told me I should stay a bit longer and play it for her. I put it on the CD player and sat next to my mother on the sofa. We just sat and listened, saying nothing, just being together. It was pretty, really pretty, and not sappy. The arrangements for solo piano were simple and the song selections a combination of the familiar and the (to me) unknown. Even Wondrous Love was on it.

Around that time I was very mindful that on some level we were getting close to the end of the road, even though she had not yet taken that final fall, the one that changed everything. I was capable when I wanted to of being in the here and now with her, being present and in the moment even when other obligations and pressures pulled me in a different direction. Nevertheless, that evening I didn’t play the whole album, just five or six tracks. I just couldn’t (or couldn’t allow myself to) sit through the whole thing. I told her I had to get up early the next day for work, which felt a little like a betrayal even if it was true. I asked Mom if I could borrow her new CD to put on my iPod, and she agreed without hesitation. When I left, she walked me to the door, and we agreed that the day had been marvelous. As she thanked me and told me how much she had enjoyed herself, her face glowed with gratitude.

Two days later she took the fall that shattered her elbow and her life. By that time I had already loaded the CD onto my iPod, and I had it with me in the hospital on New Year’s Eve, the day she had her first surgery. I put the earbuds on her as she waited to be taken to the OR and played it for her. Over the ensuing months I played that CD for my mother on many stressful and scary occasions, up until days before she died.

I took the CD with me to Cleveland for the funeral and asked for it to be played as background music during the wake. When I listen to it now, it makes me feel sad, but also takes me to my mother’s sofa on the Sunday after Christmas, as we sat quietly and listened to it together. I am so thankful that I chose to stay and listen to those five or six tracks with her, instead of promising we'd do it the next time I visited. I don’t know whether my mom’s friend had heard it and loved it before she sent it, or saw it on a rack at Marc’s for $1.99 and thought it looked like a nice little something extra to throw into the Christmas card she was sending to her friend Vicki, but it has come to mean a great deal to me. Maybe that’s the best kind of gift. You cast your bread upon the waters, and it may come back to you, but then again someone you don’t know may pick it up off the shore and find it a source of great nourishment.

Saturday Morning

I returned to Saturday morning t’ai chi in the park yesterday for the first time in months. All the old familiar faces were there. It felt good to do the form, and it’s the jump start I need to get myself back in the habit of doing the form every morning (it’s one of the many self-caring habits that fell by the wayside in the past six months). I was even able to pretend for a while that nothing in my life had changed since the last time I stood in that lovely green place, slowly shifting my weight and sinking my ch’i into my tan t’ien.

At the end of the session, as I walked across the space toward my car, I saw Jeremy, a distinguished, reserved and very serious gentleman in his early 70s who is one of the t’ai chi regulars, and is an advanced practitioner of other martial arts as well. He’s a retired journalist, and I’ve always felt a little intimidated by him. He greeted me warmly, and as we said hello, we spontaneously took each other’s hand and squeezed. Our greeting was almost affectionate. I’ve known this man for six years, and there is no precedent for such a manifestation of warmth between us-- we've certainly never touched--, yet somehow it felt very natural, and not the least awkward. Perhaps it was the spirit of my mother, who was always far more socially adept and outgoing than I, expressing itself through the medium of her daughter. Or perhaps it was because I felt so aware this morning of how wonderful it is to be able to drive to Northern Virginia on any given Saturday morning, and there they’ll be, an earnest and focused group of people whose only reason for getting up and out that early is to be in touch with their essential life energy in the presence of nature and like-minded others. Whatever it was, Jeremy felt it too. It made my day.