Wandering Along the Path: Right Speech

We drove up to our cabin overnight, to get a water leak fixed and talk to a contractor.  There was no one around, and we walked to the tiny restaurant for dinner and then found our way back by flashlight.  Late in the night I was laying on the sofa and there was not a sound, when an owl hooted three times, then at intervals again for a couple of hours.  I couldn't sleep.  I kept waiting for the next communication.  And I realized the owl was busy and nighttime was his element.  I wondered what tiny creature was being stalked.  It was very Halloweeny, and tonight is the real thing.  I'm going around with my daughter, son-in-law and youngest grandchild.  He is a dragon, and a butterball turkey kind of dragon.  I'll phone my other two grandchildren and wish them well.  I give books instead of candy, but there will plenty of sugar, I'm sure.  Since the entire country is in a ghoulish state, I can't think of a celebration more appropriate.  Let's witness the kids' innocence and our failure to fully protect them.

Wandering Along the Path: Right Speech

We went with a friend to the Richard Strauss opera "Arabella" yesterday.  The music was sublime and the voices terrific.  Seeing a comedy-romance rather than a tragedy was a welcome relief.  When we were riding home and turned on our phones we saw that the Tree of Life synagogue had been attacked, and our joy turned to sorrow.  At a bris, no less.  What should have been a celebration for a new life beginning became instead a horror show.  What popped up in my mind was gathering some friends and "guarding" a synagogue during services.  After all, most of the dead are my age or older, so if someone has a yen for gunning down old people, we can make ourselves the target, not innocent worshippers.  It's difficult not to think of our current national situation as a deeply dark period, more frightening than any horror movie or Halloween decoration.  We need to look at ourselves and find our better natures to combat this evil.  And evil it is.

Wandering Along the Path: Right Speech

My younger son and I had a rare afternoon alone together.  We saw a show he had installed at an art gallery an hour away, and we had lunch first.  The show was small, but breathtaking.  Agnes Martin paintings were in the middle two rooms and Navajo rugs were in the entry room and back room.  Each rug and each painting was spectacular.  The sense of Agnes Martin's living in the southwest was readily apparent.  With each piece, rug or painting, the closer I got, the more detail and color appeared.  There were many surprises:  flecks of red in what seemed from a distance monochromatic, and variations of yarn and color seen only as you stood a foot away from a rug.  The rugs were vivid strong deep colors, with a lot of earthy brown and deep blue of a night sky.  Martin's paintings were seemingly stripped of color except for pale peach, a luminous yellow, a washed out blue.  Yet they were the same landscape.  And they were not only representational but spiritual.  You were pulled to step into the painting or rug.  upon close viewing, the flaws in Martin's lines and the weaving in the rugs highlighted the humanity of each artist.  We took each other's photo before our favorite painting and rug.  Then we stopped by a university art museum and looked at old faves and a small show of Elizabeth Murray, who couldn't be more different, more cartoonishly playful.  Her pieces were huge and some sluggy brownish, and others neon psycadelic.  Her joy in materials was blatant and contageous.

We went back with visual memories stored in our minds for touchstones to beauty and connection with our earth and the surprising artistry of humans, with whatever materials they fashion their dreams.

Wandering Along the Path: Right Speech

Our whole family is so excited that our older daughter is having her novel published!  I know just how much effort and time it takes to get writing out in the world, and we're so proud of her.  Though I have not read it, the blurb sounds exciting and complex and deep.  I can't wait to read it.  Anything worth doing takes time.  Yes, there are the techies who become millionaires overnight, but for most of humanity it takes, as the Brad Pitt character says in "World War Z", us to GUT UP.  My husband's PhD took many years and a previous attempt at grad school.  Writing requires years of lonely struggle, art is often beating your head against a wall, and teaching is all the nights awake worrying over that kid you can't seem to reach.  My family perseveres.  We aren't flashes in the pan, we're a slow cooked meal.  And after all, isn't it the process that teaches us what we need to learn, more than the product?  What we learn is to believe in ourselves, and pursue our passions.  Against all odds.  Gut up, indeed.

Wandering Along the Path: Right Speech

Today is our daughter-in-law's birthday.  My husband and I have the tradition of singing Happy Birthday over the phone for our kids and grandkids.  Dreadful harmonies, but we do our best.  And our family is getting so delightfully full that it feels like every other week we pick up the phone.  Our daughter-in-law has only been that for a year, but she is pregnant, so we were singing for two!  How amazing that when your kid marries, you get this new kid and all their family as well!  I enjoy her brothers, their wives, and their children.  I get excited when her older brother is having their second child.  The first has played with my grandson several times, and is quite a character.  We spent the Fourth of July together, and I loved the fullness of it.  The stretching with open arms of the boundary of family.  We're all the richer for it.

Wandering Along the Path: Right Speech

One grandson is going to be a butterfly and the other a dragon, so I think they run the gamut as far as fantasy goes.  Come to think of it, both can fly, so maybe there is something about being 2 and 3 that involves the desire to dip and dive and float in the air.  I really lucked out yesterday, because I found a perfect outfit at the first place I looked for the dragon boy.  His size, with a sweet dragon face and scales, and sewn in warm fleece.  Used, of course.  I was helping out because our daughter has no time after teaching to shop on weekdays.  I used to order a costume for our granddaughter.  I think one of the first was a cupcake.  Now, at 10, she creates her own, and she has an adult sewing machine and workspace in the basement for designing.  Halloween was my favorite holiday, because there were no gifts to buy and I and then my kids got a chance to express themselves.  Yes, there was the downside - eating way too much candy, but my husband and I liked to costume ourselves as well.  One year I was a pork entree, with a cardboard table and my head coming out of the center of the plate and a pig nose on top of my own nose.  I must say, it was difficult to dance in.  But it was harder on a friend who was a bookcase with a lamp on top that worked.  He had to stay plugged into the wall all night.  Anyway, I love seeing the grandkids and some of my kids dress up, and if not overdone, the children are awash in joy.

Wandering Along the Path: Right Speech

Yesterday my friend and I saw "The Oath".  It has been compared to "Get Out" and it has some of that same nightmare in suburbia feel to it.  Like "Get Out" the ending is comforting more than likely.  But the film has many funny moments and captures the zeitgeist of now.  I really liked the reversal of expectations inherent in Tiffany Haddish's portrayal of a suburban mom.  Everyone is great in it, and as a portrait of rage among ordinary people it is dead on.  There is some violence, and it is realistic enough to put the viewer right in the middle.  You actually want to shout at the characters and put your two cents into the mix.  I'd say that is the definition of engaged.  And it is, of course, a gigantic metaphor for divisions in our country right now.  Maybe crude, but I don't think so.  And it skewers all of us, like an equal opportunity mirror.

Wandering Along the Path: Right Speech

Yesterday I attended a surprise birthday party for my friend's mother, who just turned 95.  She was genuinely surprised, as they'd already had a nice dinner, with her daughter coming out from New York, last week.  I brought a huge cake, chocolate, of course, and there were about thirty people, including her grandson who came from the south, his partner, and their dog.  It was great to celebrate, and the youngest guest was four months old, a granddaughter of one of my friend's besties from New York.  The day was sunny, the guest of honor as sharp as ever, and the blue of her blouse matched the banner on the cake.  I'm so fond of her because she's smart and we can talk movies and kids and she has a great sense of humor.  But she pulls me also because I lost my mother when I was 40 and I miss her and her presence with my kids and now grandkids.  This lucky woman has seen her kids marry, have children and now two of her four grandchildren are about to marry.  All of her grandchildren dote on her, and she is cosy in the house of her older daughter, and part of a lively life surrounded by people of all ages.  I wish my mother could have lived.  But this delightful woman seems to sense that, and we have grown very fond of each other.

Wandering Along the Path: Right Speech

My childhood friend and I are trying to work out a plan for seeing someone who grew up with us who is battling breast cancer.  We have to fly from different coasts and meet up to visit in Texas.  We will do this, but I have a hard time going to back where my brother killed himself.  It's been four years, but evidently I blame the place.  Irrational, but true.  And I am jumpy about a state where they've gone from conceal and carry to open carry.  It feels like entering territory where harm is just a hair's breath away.  I know some stuff will come up for me.  Yet this friend we're visiting was really good to my parents in their later years, and her daughter was my parents' goddaughter.  So it's clearly the right thing to do.  Having the moral support of my east coast friend will be comforting, and when I get there I believe I will be sending all my kindness to our friend.  We will also relieve her husband a bit, if only by distraction more than ability to help.  Okay, I know what's right, I'm going, and now for the details.

Wandering Along the Path: Right Speech

Two of us in my writing group are working on pieces that express our feelings for our children and grandchildren that will be a message to them after we are gone.  We realize we may not see the grandchildren's big events:  graduations, weddings, first job, college.  We want to leave an essence of ourselves for them to add to the history of our families.  I've been writing a memory book for each grandchild, and all are done.  Now I will do one for the coming baby.  I was touched when I visited my ten year old granddaughter a while back and she had her memory book readily available, and we looked through it and at photos I included.  She likes taking it out and reading it.  I was surprised and pleased.  I've been giving away jewelry from my parents and grandparents to my kids, but perhaps the words are even more valuable.  I want to say it now, while I can.  I am opening my heart and sharing in a way I haven't before.  It feels good.

Wandering Along the Path: Right Speech

Ah, old age.  I see the dermatologist this afternoon, and going makes me nervous, as I've had three skin cancers.  And many biopsies.  And several scares.  I look at my arms and it's like a garden on Mars.  New creatures pop up.  Old ones disappear.  My skin is a terrain unfamiliar to me, and with a look of severe drought.  I worry about a spot under my right eye and it's something else entirely she burns off in a blast of liquid nitrogen.  I did not notice anything strange about the three skin cancers.  You can look at all the gruesome pictures in the doctor's office and yet whatever sprouts on your own battlefield bears no resemblance to them.  I used to have nice skin.  No more.  Every moment in the sun, all the sunburns and the lack of sunscreen when I was growing up, my fair skin despite dark eyes and black hair, has come back to give me a slap on the wrist.  Today, let there be no nasty surprises.

Wandering Along the Path: Right Speech

I had to laugh when I saw Elizabeth Warren has taken a DNA test to prove she has Native blood.  I guess she's serious about running for president.  I like her forthrightness and determination.  I don't know if she's the best candidate, not at this point, but she speaks her truth, and she appears to be fearless. 
The truth is, most Americans have Native and African blood somewhere in their history.  The white man is a myth.  The same was true in Germany, when blond hair and blue eyes made you "pure".  We are a mixture, and we all come from Africa.  My cousin did a test, and found we have an abnormally large percentage of Neanderthal in our genes.  Once we got over the jokes about our family's behavior, it made sense that we were not only Native, German, Irish and whatever else (on my father's side Scot and English and Native) but that there is this through line that isn't always visible, but finds its way to the present.  We're like the stews I used to make out of whatever was in the refrigerator.  I called it "slop".  It wasn't fancy, but it was hearty and filling.  And delicious.

Wandering Along the Path: Right Speech

Our younger son and his wife told us last week that they are having a baby.  We are overjoyed.  They found each other relatively late and are so right for each other.  They are even middle children in families of four.  They married a year ago, and now, beginning in their forties, are embarking on their dream of their own family.  Both of them are the last siblings in their families to have a child.  My husband and I worried for them, that their dream might be difficult because of age.  But they will have their baby in the spring, and we will all welcome it with love and joy.  I'm happy for them, and for more cousins for the grandchildren, and for the hope it expresses, and our family's determination to look to the future, and choose love and risk and pain and connection over closing down in fear.  Love is the question, love is the answer, love is the connector and the pulse of the world.

Wandering Along the Path: Right Speech

We were submerged yesterday in the three year old birthday party world of our grandson.  There was chaos, there was movement, there was much corraling and coaxing.  The kids were delirious and running like antelope with lions surrounding them.  The party was at a children's museum, so there was much to see, climb on and explore.  Then, after a pizza lunch and cupcakes, the family went back to our son's house, and the presents were opened and intensive play took place among the four cousins.  Finally, the playhouse was built, the debris from the unwrapping cleared away, and it was time to head home.  Our grandson, was delighted, tired, overwhelmed and slightly stunned.  I expect he hit the bed last night like a cannon ball.  I've looked over my photos and relived the experience, and hey, next month the younger grandson has his birthday, and there may be a bouncy house, and the party begins all over again!

Wandering Along the Path: Right Speech

Fall is here.  Not just the cooler air, but the fog, the dropping of leaves, the sense that nightfall comes too soon.  The persimmons are ripening, though all the good ones are on the side of the fence of my next door neighbor.  I'm all set up for Halloween, mainly for my grandson, and on a fast ride to Thanksgiving, both grandson's birthdays (one's party is this weekend), my older daughter's birthday, my daughter-in-law's birthday, my younger daughter's birthday, Christmas and so on.  I told a friend the other day, I might as well buy out a card store.  I like the metaphor in the movie "Parenthood" where the grandma likens family to a roller coaster ride, up and down, up and down, and the thrill and drama that make up families.  I'm blessed with such a wonderful family, and I like how such deep love keeps me connected and empathetic towards the universe.  I'm spinning along on our whirlagig planet, and I want to keep my eyes open and see every sight along the way. 

Wandering Along the Path: Right Speech

I read a thriller recently, "Behind Closed Doors" by BA Paris, and the plot is about a lonely woman who meets a handsome man who woos her and quickly marries her.  He turns out to be a psychopath who imprisons her because he wants to torture her younger sister who has Downs Syndrome.  He has chosen her to get to her sister, and because their parents have emigrated to New Zealand.  It sounds dreadful, but it's cleverly written, and not too far off what I heard during my many years as a counselor in safehouses.  The woman realizes she must kill him, after trying to escape many, many times.  He is a lawyer for battered women, and seeing their injuries turns him on.  She is never allowed to be alone.  He locks her in a bare room when he's away.  They occasionally socialize, but he's right beside her, and his punishments make saying anything impossible.  She has no cell phone, wallet, money, id, passport, paper or pen.  Ultimately, as the time nears when her sister will be 18 and released into their care, she concocts a plan that might work, and the reader is rooting for her, because the alternative is clearly her and her sister's deaths.  A woman who has attempted to befriend her is able to help by giving her a lift to the airport, and in the end, it only takes one person to listen, believe and care. 
There is an exhilerating sense that one woman, alone, can fight for her rights and her life.  Even when all the cards are stacked against her.  We have ingenuity and strength, and can figure out how to fight the bully.
Yes, I am making an analogy here.  Never give up.  Sometimes one person's action can turn the tide:  Rosa Parks, Ghandhi, Gloria Steinem, Mahalia.  Pick one action and model what you want the citizenry to do.  Speak about it to all you meet.  There is truth, and speaking it makes us not be victims.

Wandering Along the Path: Right Speech

Yesterday I received photos of our granddaughter riding a pony,  and she looked elegant and confident.  Her mother rode as well, and we have many memories of events and competitions and horses and grooming and ribbons and excitement.  Our daughter told us this time last year that she had stage four cancer, her breast cancer returning after only four years.  This time it was in her brain as well.  Flash forward to this year, when her treatment is going well, she looks and feels good, and her future extended comfortably.  There are so many new drugs and treatments, her her first option has worked wonderfully.  She's tenacious, and she also loves her life and friends and family.  Lots of people are fighting for her, praying for her, willing her body to remain strong and fight this challenge.  Our daughter is fighter and so is our granddaughter.  Last year I was devastated, but now I know there is hope and doctors and researchers pushing for better tools to use to keep people alive and with their loved ones.  We ride the horse, the horse doesn't ride us.

Wandering Along the Path: Right Speech

Yesterday we attended a performance of Puccini's opera "Tosca" and watched while the bad guy, who looked like Brett Kavanaugh, I kid you not, tried to force Tosca to succumb to him in exchange for the life of her lover.  She got a little too upset, and stabbed him to death instead, which was gratifying, except, his promise to free her lover was a lie, and after she saw her beloved shot, she jumped from the precipice and died.  A great reminder that people are pretty much at the mercy of powerful men, even 150 years later.  Oh, well, the voices were terrific, as were the sets, and maybe Tosca had seen the movie "Thelma and Louise".  Now leaping off the tall building is not my idea of liberation, but I can see getting so frustrated it seems a good idea at the time.  Maybe Kavanaugh will see "Tosca" with RBG and have an epiphany.  Anything is possible. 

Wandering Along the Path: Right Speech

We watched "Little Shop of Horrors" last night, it's funny until Seymour chops up the dentist, then not so funny.  He didn't kill him, but now he is complicit.  And the song about skid row, the filthy alley, it all seems tasteless.  We selected the wrong musical to try to cheer us up, after Kavanaugh being sworn in.  My daughter was trying to potty train her son and I went over there to give her some moral support, but she got upset, our grandson got upset, and she was in tears feeling she'd handled it all wrong.  But everyone feels that way, and frankly, the book she read sounds like nonsense to me.  I'm glad in my day they didn't have this avalanche of advice books to get mired in.  Take it slow, give it time, wait until he's ready:  no one wants to hear it, or our suggestions.  After all, haven't things advanced and improved?  Well.  Not so much.  The idea of progress is a badly written musical.

Returning home and seeing the rest of the movie, I realized, though, that some things are pretty simple still.  If you vote for a misogynist, you don't respect any women:  not your mother, your wife, your daughter, your sister.  You've crossed the line.  You are complicit.  You want your party to support you, you want to win, more than you want to stand up for what is right.  You're all about you.  And Seymour, though he gets the girl and the house in the suburbs, has devalued life and is on the other side from decency and respect for life.  No amount of singing will shine up his tarnished soul.

Wandering Along the Path: Right Speech

Early this morning I had a nightmare.  It was the time of the Revolutionary War in Boston, and a family was trying to stay alive.  First the father died, and the mother and five children put on lots of clothes before they went outside, in the ice and snow, and I was afraid they were going to die.  They had nowhere to go, and I had a sense of doom, that I was going to see them die one after the other.  I woke myself up, and realized the dread was the vote today that allowed Kavanaugh to become a member of the Court, and the doom it spells for women and children.  This is the era of bullies, and they seem to win every time.  Frankly, in my day, bullies also got away with most actions, and the rest of us learned to stay out of their way.  I remember a girl, when I was eight, bullying me and then gloating.  I never spoke up against her, though I was furious with her actions.  I was afraid of being ostrasized.  Another bully pushed me off the high slide in the school playground to the side, and my knees and hands were so bloody my parents had to pick me up and take me home.  There were no consequences for the boy who deliberately shoved me off at the top. 
Now our government is allowing bullying and forcing silence upon those who are victims.  This is not what the Constitution was written to do.  We are protecting the rich and powerful and encouraging their immoral deeds.  I'm devastated.

Wandering Along the Path: Right Speech

The Kavanaugh fiasco, the A's losing last night, a darkly cloudy morning without rain:  all are dampening my mood.  Even the trip to the botanical gardens yesterday derailed, because when we arrived, there were no more parking spaces, and after searching everywhere, we headed elsewhere.  I took my friend to a city garden that most people don't know about and neither did she.  It was designed in the 1930s and has delightful rose beds, a lovely pond, a waterfall, benches, overhanging trees, and as it's set in a bowl, stairs leading up to woodsy areas all around.  There were volunteers pruning and a air of quiet sanctuary.  There is a walk with "mother of the year" names from the 1940s on.  Who knew there was a mother of the year award here?  After, we went in an ACE hardware garden shop, where my friend fell in love with a very strange looking, wonderful tree, and she bought small plants and then returned by herself after our outing to buy the tree.  I returned with two more cans of teak oil, and proceeded to coat the patio furniture a second time in preparation for more rain in our future.  A little sadness lingers for my team, a lot of sadness for the now predicted approval of Kavanaugh, and sense of not only having lost the outing to the botanical garden, but something infinitely more important:  my faith in my government's processes.

Wandering Along the Path: Right Speech

In a few minutes I'm going with a friend to the botanical gardens, and, after the rain, it should be especially pleasant to wander among the plants and trees.  The garden is large enough that we cannot see every part, but whatever we do see will be healing.  I like touching plants and grounding myself with them.  This morning I carefully plucked fallen leaves from a huge succulent, tenderly admiring it's hues of blue/gray/pink/purple.  I check for dead flowers on the geraniums, and pick up all the dead camelia blossoms from the ground.  There is a blanket of gold leaves from the birches next door that fall on our patio, and some of our leaves falling too.  The seasons are somewhat confused here, but I like the mixing up of fall and summer and even a hint of spring.  Our persimmon tree's fruit is turning orange as a sunset, though the fruit is overhanging our neighbor's yard instead of our own.  It's always a race between the squirrels, birds and us as to who eats it.  In these days of shorter light and cooler nights, the change is refreshes, and causes unconscious responses in our bodies and minds.  Change is a way of waking us up.

Wandering Along the Path: Right Speech

It rained last night!  I woke up this morning and told my husband we should rush downstairs and watch it coming down.  Later we walked the neighborhood loving the wetness and smell.  Our plants and trees look better already.  This is our highest fire risk month, and sometimes we don't get any rain until Halloween, so I'm grateful we've had our thirst quenched a bit.  There is no more rain forecast in the near future, but maybe that will change.  I know parts of the country are flooded, but the west is parched.  The animals can drink from this rain, and new growth will spurt. 
And maybe I can take full or partial credit, because yesterday I insisted we rub our patio furniture with teak oil, and we ran out and couldn't do the second coat, as it said to do, before last night.  So the furniture got drenched last night, and I will have to wait until it's dry again, sweep away the leaves and debris, before second and maybe third coat can be applied.  If I hadn't been in the process of protecting my furniture from rain, well, think about it, would it have even rained?!  I doubt it.  Not that I'm superstitious, but I'm already figuring out how to keep any bad karma out of the A's playoff game with the Yankees on Wednesday.  Better not to watch or listen, in case I affect the game.  Go A's!!

Wandering Along the Path: Right Speech

Yesterday I went to tea at a friend's house.  She had a serious illness several years ago and was hospitalized for months, and she decided to thank the people who visited, brought meals and generally supported her by having this party.  At each place was a hand written note of gratitude for the guest.  I think we were all very touched by her thoughtfulness and generosity, and I certainly left with warm feelings.  I brought her flowers because I realized I was so grateful she lived.  She had only a 50% chance of surviving, but she did.  Her recouperation has been long and arduous, and she's been mostly cheerful and upbeat about a time she can't even remember.  I was especially inspired by the devotion of her friends and family.  They were there every step of the way, talking to her when she was in a coma and encouraging her.  It was a blessing to be a part of that process and a witness.