Fantasy/Reality

I watched the season finale of "Desperate Housewives" with the same guilty pleasure I have enjoyed all season. This may be a soap opera, mindless, poorly written, or another 20 adjectives that the critics use to express their dismay but I gotta tell you for me it is the best intersection of black humor, mystery, and just plain fun on t.v. The only show in my mind that might have the same possibilities is "Grey's Anatomy"but it's too early to tell on that one.

I love to watch interesting/entertaining t.v. I don't consider it a mindless waste of time or a frivolous use of time. It is entertainment pure and simple and if my idea of entertainment is different than yours - there's something for everyone. At work I deal with people all day long who are in the throes of various difficulties. And then there are the just cranky ones who make life difficult. And don't forget the sweet ones who love to drop by and chat for hours while I'm trying to type the Sunday bulletin. Admittedly, these are small problems in the world but it's fun to forget about them when I go home and tune in to shows like "Desperate Housewives." I don't watch t.v. 7 nights a week, I don't even watch every Sunday. But to be able to check out once in a while is great. My husband and I have a running debate about this because his idea of the best t.v. is all things sports, which could be a 24 hour a day deal. He insists that sports has a greater value than the shows I watch because it is "real." Also, stupid, macho, and steroid driven, but hey who am I to be a critic. He watches his stuff, I watch mine. And never the two shall meet, although I did catch him watching Housewives one night when he was surfing but I think it was because Eva Longoria was in the bathtub. He would agree that in addition to sports, sex will always get his attention, for real or on t.v.

In my youth I loved to use artificial means for checking out, the specifics to remain known only to me and a few close friends, but in the wisdom of advancing age I no longer partake of anything stronger than a very occasional glass of wine. For me the fun of a well written t.v. show serves the same purpose (well almost), it provides a break from everyday reality, and I don't even have to wake up feeling yucky. Some would call me shallow. Perhaps.

But I deal with the same realities the deeper thinkers of the world are dealing with. I know about the crisis in Darfur, the war in Iraq, the Bird Flu in China, the crisis in Social Security, the Real Estate bubble. I am charitable to those in need, work in my church's food pantry, write letters to my Congress people, read the papers, wring my hands, shake my head, recycle my trash, and watch my fossil fuel consumption. There's more in the world to cry over than to laugh about. But isn't it great to have the opportunity to laugh. Doesn't it feel good to have those belly laughs. I don't want to lose the ability to see the fun in life, to enjoy the fantasy, to participate in pleasurable activities.

I think it's what I hate about the conservatives. They are so serious. Actually, the liberals too. Everything is a crisis, a reason to despair, a fight waiting to happen. Can't we all just chill out? There is no indication that our overzealous, hyperactive, argumentative, confrontational, sky is falling dramas are truly achieving anything more than pissing us all off. Or worse yet putting us all to sleep.

So for me, some t.v. is an antidote to desperation. Maybe the "housewives" need to watch more of it. If one or two hours a week of escape helps me do more and be better the rest of the time then I'm all for it. Perhaps I am just part of the brave, new world, where people escape into their soma driven fantasies but I prefer to think that moderation, in all things including escape, is the best way to remain effective and happy. For those of you who agree, do you think Mike is going to get shot? And for the rest of you, if you don't know who Mike is tune in next season and you'll find out.

Living and Dying

Our son's fiancee's father has terminal cancer, just diagnosed, in every bone in his body. Not much life left according to the medical personnel. My husband and I are trying to console our son and help him with this but we realize that this is a hurdle we have not crossed. We have four living parents. We have not had to deal with the messy end of life issues with our parents yet although we find ourselves, more and more, trying to approach subjects with them that were avoidable for many years. How do you talk to your parents about their finances, their end of life wishes, their imagined legacy, their spiritual thoughts. We are having a hard time in our 50's and our son and future daughter in law are 23. I find myself at a loss for words as he asks me questions about what to say to her, to them, how to get information, provide support, deal with medical people, on and on the list goes.

Although there have been times when I have not been able to answer his questions over the years I now find myself struggling not only to help him but also pondering for myself how to grapple with these big issues. Our parents have been so self sufficient and independent that there have been few openings for these serious conversations. It is in the nature of parents to say, "don't worry about us, we have everything taken care of." But do we?

If nothing else this has been an awakening for me in terms of how I want to talk with our children. I realize that the earlier these conversations start and the more willingness we show to discuss the hard stuff the easier it will be for them as we come to the time in our life when we need them to worry about us and take care of us. I hope that we don't have to burden them with our cares but the reality is that the only people in our lives who care about us as much as we care about each other are our children. I wish that our son did not have to take this on right now but there is no good time. We won't know the time or place of our death. But we can lay the groundwork for ongoing conversation with our kids about the tough stuff. I want them to know about our vulnerabilities as well as our strengths even if that is scary for them and for us.

We die alone but we don't have to die uncared for. How much support and love we receive in the end is related to how much we are willing to be open to receiving it. We are walking through the grocery store today picking over heads of lettuce and discussing these big, tough subjects. I love to shop with our children, the grocery store has been the center of a lot of good conversation over the years. I hope we have a lot more years of shopping together, picking over the lettuce, and debating whether to buy the chocolate chip or peanut butter cookies. I love our kids, I hate it that they will most likely have to deal with our dying, and I thank God everyday that we have them in our lives. We may die alone but our love for them will live on.

Commitment

How many times I have started something, not to finish it. My mother used to tell me it was my worst fault. She would become so annoyed when I would quit my lessons, quit brownies, quit an endless number of activities that she felt were worthwhile and broadening and that I hated. As I grew older I realized that most of us have this fault. We all start out with the best of intentions and somewhere along the way we lose interest. This can be particularly annoying to those around us when they are depending upon us to hold up our part of the bargain. Who can forget the person who walks out of the job on the day that they are most needed, or the person who promises to bring the cookies for the tea and calls at the last minute with lame excuses or worse yet just doesn't show up. Or more painfully, the father who leaves his family with no warning, or the mother who is unwilling to parent and so just lets whatever happens happen. And then there is the spouse who realizes belatedly that marriage isn't really what he or she is interested in and be it one year or fifty the betrayal of that commitment is not forgotten.

In so many ways we fail those who depend upon us. More importantly we fail ourselves. The list of those failures follows us around like a naughty list for the kid who's getting the lump of coal at Christmas. We beat ourselves up with our failures and if we are really into narcissistic punishment one failure begets another and another until we are sunk in a pit of depression that is hard to climb out of. And we wonder why we are the Prozac nation.

We can recite line and verse the litany of our mistakes, if not out loud certainly loudly enough that we ourselves cannot forget. Whether the world recognizes our essential failures we recognize them. For every good thing that you can say about me there is a yes but in response. It is a neurotic and damning way of life that is reinforced by each new mistake. And if someone is so lucky not to have this particular neurosis we brand them uncaring at the least, character disordered at the most extreme. We want our friends to have been raised by mothers, whether Jewish or not, who have taught them the value of guilt if not the value of following through.

I would like to propose though an essential human truth that our mother's may not have been quite as keen for us to learn. We are sinners, we make mistakes, we often don't have what it takes to stay the course. We learn by trial and error, usually remembering most keenly those lessons that resulted in our falling on our butts. We are not perfected. Far from it. If commitment has a value in the course of our lives it is in the fact that each time we try again to stick to something we become stronger, better able to hang in there, more able to appreciate that sometimes the very act of staying the course makes us better able to see what the course is. But this is a lesson learned over a lifetime of getting it wrong. Instead of beating ourselves mercilessly over the head for each failure we need to look through the lens of our lives and see how each one has led us towards a more enduring and persistent ability to be committed.

Of course there are those of us who don't learn this lesson. But for those of us who do the other thing our mother's never told us is that it can take a lifetime to know one's truth, to pin down one's desire, to separate the proverbial wheat from the chaff, and find the small wonderful nugget of truth that defines us. We are not born knowing what commitments we are worthy of. We cannot know easily or quickly which of lifes lures is a trap and which a call to true faith. We are not easily persuaded to give our all and yet ultimately giving our all is what makes us not sinners but saints.

This is what I wish my mother had said to me. Child, instead of evaluating your life by your failures, evaluate each of your failures to understand what it says about you. Because each time you make this examination you will get closer to understanding what is most important for you in your life and how you must go about committing yourself to it. Let your failures be your teachers. Your life is a process of learning how to commit.

Love, Mom

Prejudice

In my youth I was a card carrying member of the SDS, NOW, and any other left wing radical organization devoted to eliminating sexism, racism, and Richard Nixon from office, not to mention ending the war in VietNam. I prided myself on my advanced views, my advocacy for the rights of the downtrodden, my vehement protest of unjust war and unfair advantage.

I prided myself on my feminist viewpoint and was very vocal in my defense of women's rights and the elimination of male supremacy in the world. I was eager for women's freedom to choose not only reproductively but in every other aspect of life. I was convinced that most problems in the world were the product of twisted male thinking. I supported revolution, believed that the world could be righted by the politics of dissent.

The civil rights movement, with it's emphasis on non violent confrontation and the use of the legal system to advance the rights of blacks, was a model of how progress could be made towards equality for all people. Martin Luther King was a hero to me. I grew up in a city suburb that was virtually lily white. I did not know any black people in my childhood, I'm not even sure I knew there were people of other races. So by the time I went to college and established my bon fides as a radical intellectual I was convinced that I had escaped the taint of racism, did not believe that there was a racist bone in my body. I was to find out differently before too long.

Towards the end of my sophomore year of college, 1971, I attended a showing of art in the gallery at our school that was done by black artists. There was a reception going on in the gallery and many black people were in attendance. This was notable since the city I went to college in was 80% Catholic and 98% White. We didn't often go places in that town where we were outnumbered by people of color or Protestants. I was standing with a friend smoking a cigarette as I looked over the crowd that was milling around. This was when it was more politically correct to smoke than not to, or at least considered chic by most of my peers. My friend asked me for a drag off my cigarette, a common request since we were always broke and cigarettes were a luxury we couldn't always afford. Many times we had shared cigarettes. As I handed it to her I said in a rather loud voice, "fine, take a drag, but don't nigger lip it." As the words fell out of my mouth a sudden hush came over the room, I learned what it means to be so quiet you can hear a pin drop. My mortification was absolute. I had committed a sin that in my own mind was so huge that I fell from grace instantly. I literally ran from the building in tears. I have not ever known such shame, before or since.

What I learned that day is that oftentimes the enemy lies within us. The sins of the father are indeed passed on. My own misguided sense of pride and ego trumped my desire for goodnesss. I deserved the shame I felt that day. It snapped me back from my self righteousness. To this day I feel the shame of that sin on my soul. If I had been more courageous I would have stood up and apologized for my own ignorance. I don't think I deserved forgiveness but I did need to acknowledge my egregious breach. I am an optimist in my belief that we all share in goodness, that day I learned that we also all share in sin. We are all part of the same body, each of us dependent on the rest, we all bleed when one of us is cut - whether in the Sudan, Afghanistan, or the ghetto of any urban city here in the U.S. we all are part of the problem and must be part of the solution. You don't get a pass on being in the world.

Bread

I take a large bowl out of the cupboard, a bag of flour off the shelf, some salt, a little sugar, some oil, yeast. I turn the tap to it's warmest setting and let the water flow until it is hot to the touch. I begin to mix. Some yeast, the water, a little sugar. I wait and watch as the yeast begins to move and mix and grow. Into the flour and oil and salt it goes, making a thick, soupy mass of goop. I add more flour and then more still until the goop becomes a glistening ball of dough, slightly elastic to the touch, warm and smelling yeasty. Into another bowl it goes, slick with oil top and bottom, to sit and grow undisturbed, covered by a clean towel to keep the drafts away and the warmth in. When I look again it has grown anew, the top blistered with bubbles of yeast, it begs to be punched down and divided into loaves. I knead it and shape it and form it into loaves the size of the bread pans. I lay each loaf in it's own pan, making sure that the ends are supported by the ends of the pan, I cover it and wait again. In a while, I turn on the oven and the kitchen grows warm with the heat. When the oven is warm enough, the loaves raised enough, the time long enough, I place the pans on the oven rack and close the oven door. Soon, the smell of fresh bread makes it's way through the house. When it is time I open the oven door and remove the lovely bread. It is hollow to my tap, the crust brown and ready for a brush of butter across it's expanse. It falls effortlessly from the pan when I turn it over and I place the loaves on a rack to cool. Before they are ready to be wrapped someone takes a knife from the drawer and cuts off one end, butters the slice, a little jelly, and before I know it one loaf is half gone as my family comes in and samples the fresh bread. Before the week is over the bread will be toasted for breakfast, sliced and grilled with cheese, a sandwich for roast beef and lettuce with cheese, a bedtime snack. It will barely last long enough for Sunday dinner when some will be broiled with tomato and mozzarella cheese, fresh herbs and olive oil drizzled over it, and served with the pasta.

When I was young we would often visit my father's aunts. He had seven of them, all sisters of his mother, who had died when he was 2. So the Aunts were his surrogate mom's, a veritable army of love and solicitous adoration. My Aunt Fanny would cut paper dolls from newspaper in long strings that always amazed us. How did they stay together? My Aunt Vicki would always be ready to make you a hamburger, no matter the time of day or the day of the week. Her house always smelled like hamburgers and big fat french fries, cut fresh and piping hot from the oil. My Aunt Adele was the bread baker. My grandfather and his sisters had come here from Lebanon where they lived in a tiny mountain town. In the United States they migrated west and ended up in the mountains of Colorado. Eventually, Adele moved south to New Mexico, where she could still see the mountains surrounding Albuquerque. We would visit there often for she was a favorite aunt. Each Saturday at my Aunt Adele's was baking day. She would awaken early and the ritual began, a large bowl, some yeast, a huge bag of flour, oil, salt and sugar. But this bread was different than my high loaves. She would prepare the dough, let it rise, and then break it into eight or ten small pieces. Each piece would become a round, flat loaf. When it had rested she would take the small piece of dough and begin to pull it and stretch it, as it grew bigger she would toss it across one forearm and then the other until it was a big, flat disc. She would lay it on the hot rack of the oven and in only a couple minutes the bread would be done on one side and turned. She would work at this all morning, piling the loaves on a clean towel on the floor until eventually the stack would be above the counter. Of course if you were lucky enough to be there you could grab a loaf and run off with it, pulling it apart and gulping it down, as you ran. If you were more patient Aunt Adele would take a piece still warm and drench it with butter that would drip off the edges of the bread and down your arms as you ate it. When she had finished her bread making, usually about 100 loaves in a morning, she would package the bread for her three sons and their families and we would deliver it to them. And the ritual was the same.

This ritual, repeated every week or two, month in and month out, for years marks the rhythms of our family as it grows and changes. And yet the ritual of the bread baking remains the same, a little flour, a bowl, some yeast, oil, sugar, salt and hot water. Sometimes some cinnamon, or milk instead of water, but basically no change. The yeast grows, the bread rises, the heat bakes it. There is no culture that does not have a bread recipe handed down from one mother to her daughter, or father to son. In the simple ritual of bread making I reach back in time to other people, and other cultures. All of us continuing the ritual.

Magic

I often wonder if there is magic left in the universe. Is the black, cold, emptiness of it so overwhelming that even the starlight is dimmed by comparison? Each little star a twinkling inferno that eventually blinks out and yet the black, cold emptiness remains. Some would argue that there has never been magic, that the creation of the universe is the result of some great big bang that happened by the coming together of random events which resulted in an explosion of elements and here we are. No mystery, no magic, nothing more than a series of accidental happenings resulting in us.

When I was younger I would wonder what it would be like to find the "man of my dreams" and I would ponder the mystery of this. Would he be tall, dark, and handsome - a brooding presence like the universe, or a cheap romance novel hero. Or would he be brilliant, shy, and bespectacled - like the tiny star peeking out at me from behind the clouds on a dark night, or the Harry Potter type hero. Would we fall magically in love and live happily ever after?

For if you think about love, what is it that causes us to be as helplessly attracted to one another as those atoms hurtling together in that smashing explosion of creation? We fling ourselves towards each other in the certainty that we are each other's destiny perhaps later to discover that the big bang has led to creation but not to wonder. Is it too cynical to think that our desire is less the working of magic than the chemical explosion of our desire to live on? The universe is vast, our dreams and hopes a tiny counterpoint to it's majesty. We awaken, we work, we live, we sleep. "To sleep perchance to dream?"

I Lost You in Lowes OR The Big Box Mystery

I wander the aisles of Lowes looking for an appropriate border for the church bathroom, something with a little spiritual enhancement to it's edges. I am supposed to meet you somewhere after you return from the bathroom but I can't remember if it's tools or lawn and garden, which are separated by at least an acre of concrete so I am reluctant to go to far either way. Instead I stand aimlessly in the middle wondering if I am lost or if you are lost or if I will ever find the border to end all borders in the stock wallpaper section. My dilemmas are plentiful, my answers few. In the big box store the box is divided into about ten zillion sections each about a mile long so it might more appropriately be named "Labyrinth" than "Lowes". That name would most probably be lost on the many shoppers who come through the doors so at least from the Madison Avenue perspective "Lowe's" works.

I begin to edge towards the garden center thinking that surely that is where you would most likely wander to, being that you are feeling the urgency of spring planting, grass seeding, fertilizing, and mowing. But alas, I do not see you. I am dreading the walk back to tools, a section of the big box defined by narrow, long aisles with no cut throughs. Tools is not my favorite part of this place. I am more interested in lighting and paint, and love to look at hardware and faucets, and then there's all those great cabinets in mini kitchens that make you dream of what they would like in your kitchen eliminating the greasy, out of date ones you currently have. There's also the flooring section where you can imagine your bare feet on plush carpet, hard, cold tile or smooth, polished wood.

My reverie is interrupted by a noise. I look up to see one of those big fork lifts backing up towards me with a honking noise. The operator seems annoyed that I have not scurried away from his menacing presence. I am annoyed that he is in the way of my path to tools. I detour and he smugly backs up over my tracks and down the aisle. In tools I am held up by too many men ogling the saws and drills and blocking the very narrow aisle I want to get down. It is frustrating that I cannot see over the merchandise to the next aisle and must walk all the way to the end and around only to find that you are not there. Now I am really irked. What started out as an outing for 3 rolls of border and a couple plants has turned into a walking marathon. If I really wanted to walk it sure wouldn't be inside here. I could be outside walking in the sunshine, looking at the blooming trees of spring and smelling the new grass. Instead I am plodding through aisle after aisle of stuff. And this is stuff that you buy so you can go home and work on projects that you would never have thought of if this stuff wasn't all sitting here crying for you to take it home and hang it up, nail it down, plane it, saw it, paint it, and on and on until you fall into bed groaning. Stuff that overwhelms your desire by the sheer magnitude of it all.

Those old hardware stores, the ones with rickety wooden floors and bad lighting, and shelves bent with merchandise didn't have the seductive call of this big box. You could run in, buy a screw or two, and head out without much thought. You went for what you needed and if you hung around it was to talk to the old guy at the cash register about squirrel proof bird feeders not about how to lay your own hardware floors in a day. I asked one of them one day if those "squirrel proof" bird feeders are guaranteed. He replied, "young lady (aside - I loved that considering that I was only young by comparison, although my best friend says men are always looking for a woman 20 years younger - another story) all those squirrels have to do all day long is sit there and figure out ways to get into those feeders. So you gotta figure that sooner or later they will succeed." Moral: Don't kid yourself, there is no such thing as a squirrel proof bird feeder regardless of the 'money back guarantee' enticement. There aren't many old guys to talk to in the big box, at least not for any length of time because there are too few of them for the square footage of the place. Just the opposite of the old hardware store that usually had about 2 old guys for every customer in the place. I think it's where they all retired to from their jobs at the factories and on the farms. Those guys know a lot about a lot of stuff but they aren't useful in the big box because they, too, are overwhelmed by the size of their surroundings.

I head back to wallpaper, figuring that if you are gone forever I will at least have found the border appropriate for peeing in a church. Turns out they have one that's suitable, bird houses that say peace, love, joy and little candles twined with ivy. Works for me. I feel satisfied that I have accomplished at least one task in this place, even if it has taken 45 minutes of wandering around looking for you and dodging fork lifts. I am ready to check out. My hope now is that you will come to the car when you are done and find me sitting there or that you are there waiting. I get in line behind one of those guys with a long flat bed cart, stacked high with lumber and bags of cement. I comment on the fact that it looks like he will be working hard today. "Jeez", he says, "ever since they opened this place I spend my weekends on projects that take all day and I can't get out of here quickly because my wife wanders off and I spend a half hour looking for her." I nod in sympathy, there is nothing more to say. Walking towards the car I see you waving at me from the parking place. "Where the heck have you been," you say, "I was done 30 minutes ago." I want to scream, I want to cry, I want to go home. Instead I turn to you and say, "don't you think 'I Lost You in Lowes', would make a fine country song."