Shy And

After 36 years working at the center, I am finally retiring. Four weeks from today I will be a lady of leisure, at least until financial realities force me to take a job as a greeter at Wal-Mart to pay for my nursing home insurance. Since I have been employed since the age of 18, this is going to be different, to say the least. I will have to get my head around who I actually am without my job, or at least get my head around the idea that I don't have to be anybody in particular.


My co-workers, some at least, are having a hard time with my decision, too. They keep insisting I am going to be bored and miss my job. I'm 63 years old and work with toddlers who have low frustration tolerance, maniacal energy, and voices loud enough to break glass. I think I'll risk it.


My retired friends, on the other hand, have no regrets. Some of them wonder how they ever found time to work. That worries me. I was hoping that retirement would bring leisure time, lots of it, even if I have to devote a few hours a day to a strange practice I have heard of called "housework". What little I know of it seems to require taking some kind of "Pledge". I'm sure I can find out more on Google.


My BFF is also going to be retiring at the end of the year, now that her youngest is graduating from college, so we are looking forward to trips together to places our husbands don't want to visit and girlie lunches in tea rooms. Thirty years ago we used to go to marches and rallies together. Things change. Friendship hangs on.

Love

spider lilies blooming in the backyard

My husband is not the romantic type. His attitude for the most part is "I told you I loved you some time or another and I'll get back to you if that changes." Once when we were on a cruise I saw that there was a ceremony being held for couples who wanted to renew their vows. When I asked hubby if he wanted us to renew our vows he did not even look up from his coffee as he asked in bewilderment, "Why, have they expired?"

What hubby is is the practical type.  When I locked my key in my car twice in one month, hubby drove thirty miles round trip each time to unlock the car with his spare key. Then he bought me a magnetic key holder to put under my bumper. When my son had an ambitious science project to complete that required simulating a beach in a kiddy swimming pool, hubby borrowed a pickup truck and drove to a sand pit in the rain to buy sand. When I had surgery on my foot, hubby helped me wrap my foot in plastic bags and get on and off my shower chair for weeks until I finally got the bandages off.


Not to mention that he does most of the housework and half the cooking.


Even so, occasionally I am moved to remark that it's nice to get flowers as a surprise. And surprise he does. One day I came home from an errand to find a vase full of orange flowers like the ones pictured above sitting on the mantle. 'Where did you get them?" I asked. As it turned out, he got them from the vacant lot next door to a rent house he owned downtown. "There are a whole bunch of them," he added. "If you like them I can dig some up and plant them in the back."


Ah, my ever practical hubby. The spider lilies, as it turns out they are called, are the oddest flowers. The leaves bloom in the spring, then they appear to die away, and leafless flowers pop up a few months later, when I least expect them. As I said, it's nice to get flowers as a surprise.


So I'm keeping him. Him and the spider lilies.

Stalking Miss Iowa

Abbey is the one in blue.

Every September for the past nine years, the small non-profit organization I work for has held a fundraiser breakfast. For the first seven years we had the usual run of motivational speakers, including one who was informally voted Worst Speaker Ever. Last year we had the good fortune of getting D.J. Gregory, author of  Walking with Friends, as our keynote speaker, and everyone was mesmerized. One of our board members noted, "I can listen to Dale Brown at practically any meeting I go to, but I don't get to hear speakers who have disabilities."


So this year my boss tried to get Temple Grandin, but that fell through. Instead we found Abbey Curran, Miss Iowa-USA 2008. Abbey is your ordinary, run-of-the-mill drop dead gorgeous beauty queen with cerebral palsy. When Abbey entered her first beauty pageant, one of her teachers tried to discourage her, saying, "Abbey, be realistic." As the parent of one of my little ones noted, "I'm surprised she would say something like that. Was she trying to get sued?"


In addition to being gorgeous, Abbey is a very funny speaker. She talked of growing up on a hog farm and how all her friends envied her. Abbey also talked about her first beauty pageant, and how worried she was that she would fall getting to the stage. She was proud to report that she didn't fall, but her dress did – right to her knees.


(I'm not sure whether to believe that story.)


I didn't exactly stalk Miss Iowa, but what with one of my co-workers taking official pictures, the news people taking pictures, and several of the organizers taking pictures, I had to squeeze in where I could to get a few blurry, badly lit shots. She didn't seem too upset.


Later that evening, my husband and I went out to dinner. At the next table I heard a woman saying, "I gave them a donation. They showed a video that really tugged at your heartstrings. And the speaker was from Iowa. She won a beauty pageant." Small world – she had been at our breakfast. On my way out I thanked her for her donation, hoping all the while I didn't still have hot wing sauce on my face.


I wonder about the Abbeys of the world. What is it that makes some people say, "I can do that" when everyone else is saying, "Be realistic"? Are people born with that kind of confidence and determination, or do they develop it as they grow? Just being gorgeous isn't enough to win you a beauty contest. You have to enter. You have to show up.


You have to be willing to risk falling on your face.

Horoscopes

Yesterday, my husband developed a yen for pizza instead of the nourishing dinner I had planned for him: roast salmon, sauteed eggplant and peppers, salad and sourdough bread. Well, he was buying, so I stowed the salmon for another night and went with him to our favorite pizza place. We found two free copies of a local magazine, Town Favorites, to read while we were waiting for our orders. I turned to the horoscopes, which I read out loud to my husband along with my editorial comments.

Gemini (May 22-June 21)

Don't overspend to impress someone who interests you. Okay, no big tip for the cute waiter. Emotional situations could bring out your stubborn nature. Oh, you think?  Be sure to keep communication open with those you live with. Who, what's his name? What would I want to do that for?  [This prompted What's His Name to remind me who was springing for pizza.]  You could receive recognition for a job well done. Not in this lifetime. Your luckiest events this month will occur on a Friday. 

The last sentence didn't even deserve comment. There have been two Fridays this month up to this writing and so far I have spent them having blood drawn, getting my bones scanned, and having one of those ultrasounds that require you to drink 32 ounces of water and hold it for an hour or so while someone pokes around your innards with a probe. Even happier news, the ultrasound revealed a fibroid tumor and a cyst, which means in a few weeks I get to do the ultrasound all over again. If these are the lucky events this month, maybe I should spend the rest of it in bed.

Okay, on to hubby's horoscope:

Taurus (April 21-May 21)

You can't always have your own way. [bolding mine]

I didn't get to read any further because that sentence provoked his sad face, which always cracks me up. I note, however, that his luckiest events this month will occur on a Monday. Now if I'm getting lucky on Fridays and he's getting lucky on Mondays, doesn't this portend marital disaster?

I turn quickly to my son's horoscope. He's not around but what the heck:

Scorpio (October 24 - November 22)

Take time to find out all you can. Can I recycle that "not in this lifetime" crack? Make sure any presentation you have is ready. In-laws may cause difficulties. If it turns out he has recently acquired in-laws without telling me, it's mom who will be causing the difficulties, no matter how ready his presentation is. Travel should be considered. Oh, yes. He's supposed to be returning to Paris on business, preferably with his well-prepared presentation. I understand they are having strikes and bomb threats in Paris. Something to do with the burka being banned. The Parisians take their fashion quite seriously. Situations in your personal life are moving a little fast lately. I'll say, if he's suddenly acquired in-laws. Your luckiest events this month will occur on a Wednesday.

 At least among the three of us, we have the good luck spread out nicely across the week.

 

Seeds

Today I was working with D again and we were looking at an abbreviated, board book version of the book, The Carrot Seed.  While D showed his mastery of simple WH questions (yay!) by pointing as I asked, "Where is the carrot?" and "Where is the older brother?", I reflected, as I so often do, that three of the four characters in the book were unbelievably dumb. I understand the charm of the book, really I do. I love the illustrations. I love the indomitable spirit of the little boy, watering his carrot seed every day and pulling up the weeds, despite the naysayers. I used to have a vinyl record of the story that I played to my little students of long ago, back when we still had a record player, and I can still sing the tunes that went with some of the words. Heck, I bought the book when the record was no more.


But when I drop my willing suspension of disbelief, I find I can't understand the attitude of the parents at all. Okay, older brothers are born to say, "Nah, nah, it won't come up", but why should parents be so convinced that a seed won't grow? Grow is what seeds do. It's not as if the boy wrote to his favorite baseball player inviting him to dinner and lo and behold, there he is at the door.  It seems to me that people as stupid as the parents should not, unlike the carrot, be allowed to breed.


And I shared these thoughts with little D, a bad habit of mine when I know that my jaundiced comments are flying over a child's head and not likely to do any harm. Then I announced it was playtime.


I have been working for a long time to get D to say "I want truck" rather than just name the item he wants to play with. Despite the fact that he is now talking in sentences, short and ungrammatical as they may be, and despite a few successes, D just did not seem to get it.  So when I asked, "What do you want?" it was with the expectation of a long go-round to get those three words out of him, in order, in any kind of temporal proximity to each other.


And D said, as naturally as any other child, as if it had never been a problem, without any hesitation, "I want bus."


I think I get it now.

Oh, carrots grow from carrot seeds.

I planted one and grew it.

I watered it, I pulled the weeds.

Carrots grow from carrot seeds.

Cliche

The post office at Fin del Mundo - the end of the world, or the ends of the earth

No matter how much I try to stand out in the world, I am really a walking cliche. I am part of the Baby Boom generation, so I have a lot of peers. I am overweight, like so many Americans are. I am middle class and white. I even have a blog, like how many million other people?

But the two cliches I embody the most are the two best. I have a husband who literally followed me to the ends of the earth, and a mom who literally walked through fire for me.

My husband did not want to go on an Antarctic cruise the first time I brought it up, or the second time, or the fifth time. After three years, I had given up on getting him to go when one day he said out of the blue, "So you want to go to Antarctica." Shortly after we paid the deposit in the fall of 2008, the stock market crashed, and he began having second thoughts, but we couldn't get the deposit back anyway, so we decided to prop up the world economy the best we could with our travels. The ship left from Ushuaia, Argentina, the southernmost city in the world, and home of the Unidad Postal Fin Del Mundo, the official end of the world. I love to brag that my husband followed me there.

Without my mom, though, I wouldn't have been alive to have those adventures. My "mom" is actually my stepmom. She came into my life when I was 8, three years after my mother died, so she's my mom, even though our relationship was rocky, to say the least. The only thing we seemed to have in common is being hypersensitive and quick to take offense. Otherwise, she was an extrovert high school drop out to whom family and friends were everything; I am a bookish introvert to whom friendships come hard and grades came easy. If we had been more easy-going people those differences might not have mattered, but they did.

But if she didn't accept me, adore me, or understand me, there is no doubting the woman loved me. One day, standing in our cold kitchen trying to make breakfast, I reached over the stove. My dad had left the oven on and the door open to heat the kitchen, and despite being a supposedly bright 14 year old I did not think to close the oven door first. Before I knew it, my robe was on fire. I panicked and screamed for my mom. Not knowing what else to do, she walked up to me and pulled my robe off me with her bare hands.  For the next two weeks, she had to have people help her with her intimate needs until her hands healed. For the next six weeks, I was in a hospital having third degree burns debrided and skin grafts in six different spots, but I was alive.

I would like to say that that incident was a turning point in our relationship, but it was not. We tried to reach out to each other but always wound up feeling mawkish and gave up. Mom did support me through my divorce from my ex, and she adored my son, but we were never close. I don't know if she ever did know how much I appreciated what she did for me.

So I am, as I said, an ordinary person, one of a large and undistinguished crowd. But I have a husband who followed me to the ends of the earth and a mom who walked through fire for me, and I wouldn't trade that for a Nobel Prize.

Glurge

One hundred years from now,

It won't matter what car I drove,

What kind of house I lived in,

How much I had in my bank account,

Nor what my clothes looked like,

But, the world may be a little better

Because I was important in the life of a child. 

If you work with or have children, you have probably seen the paragraph above at least once in your life. Since I work at a non-profit pediatric rehabilitation center, I keep encountering it posted on bulletin boards and coworker's desks, and whenever I do, my reaction is the same. "One hundred years from now", I mutter to myself, "that kid'll be dead, too."

It's amazing how many untruths can be compressed into so few words. One hundred years from now it won't matter whether I drove a gas guzzler or a fuel efficient car? Won't matter whether my house was well-insulated and used solar energy as opposed to drafty and expensive to heat? Let me introduce you to Al Gore.

It won't matter how much I had in my bank account? Won't matter if I finish my years on welfare? Won't matter if my son spends what would have been his children's college fund supporting me in my old age? Let me see if I can find a bridge to sell you. That might help my bank account immensely.

Won't matter what my clothes looked like? Okay, that one is right, but try not wearing any clothes at all and use the "one hundred years from now" excuse. It matters now.

What does it even mean to say "it won't matter"? Won't matter to whom? To the people who will be alive one hundred years from now. They won't care what car I drove or what house I lived in, but if they don't care about me, then why on earth should I care what they are going to think? They don't even exist yet, and maybe never will, so when did they get a vote in my life choices? It matters to me, right now, what clothes I wear, what house I live in, what car I drive and what's in my bank account, and to try to argue me out of having a preference by pointing out that eventually I'll be dead and won't care strikes me as wrong-headed in the extreme. It's the kind of argument a mugger could use while stealing my car keys and spare cash - "Hey, lady, a hundred years from now you'll never even care."

The fact is that caring for children is an overly sentimentalized and underpaid task. If you can make people feel crass for even expecting to be paid for doing it, then you won't have to pay them (much). Sappy sentiments don't go far at the grocery store, I've noticed. Money does.

Besides, who knows what is going to have an impact on a child's life one hundred years from now? Maybe if I had traded in my eleven year old car and bought a new one five years ago, some car salesman would still have a job. Maybe the effect I had on the life of his child was to keep the kid out of college, or braces. Maybe if we had built that bigger house we talked about, some builder's child would be in medical school by now.

I propose a new meme. "One hundred years from now, it won't matter that the Saints won Superbowl XLIV, but even so, what I make for being important in the life of a child is 1/40 of  Drew Brees' base salary." It doesn't sound as poetic as the original, but it's something to think about.