Adieu!

I think in many ways getting older just kind of sucks. Especially when your birthday coincides with the PNW’s seemingly never-ending rainy season. It’s dreary, I’m pale as toothpaste, and I can’t seem to find the motivation to work out. I have an acute case of the blech’s.

Blech.

Poor me, I know. But it *was* just my birthday, so let me sulk for a second. Ok, I’m over it now.

Now I would like to end this post by remembering all of the great things about my 37th year (ugh – it still makes me wince to say it):

I am so, so very grateful that, after years of being too immature, or self-involved, or unsure of myself, or whatever it was, to have found and married a man who I not only love but respect with all of my being. Wow, that took a long time!

I am also incredibly fortunate to have taken a path – full of detours and zig-zags and more than a few missteps – that led me to the place I am now. And I mean that both geographically and philosophically. I am pretty close to exactly where I want to be.

I am blessed with wonderful friends – a core group of people that I know have got my back, and there are few things as comforting as that.

Now that I’ve started this list, I realize how very long it actually is. I am going to stop it here, though. I want to take advantage of every second of this pretty excellent life I’ve got.

I am going to attempt to do a bit less of the self-editing thing, and see if that helps me write more frequently, and with a little more gusto.

Who would have thought that Mom was wrong? It has taken me YEARS of reprogramming to realize this. As I get older, I look around me at friends who have realized this universal truth – work and fulfillment need not be mutually exclusive.

Sometimes there needs to be a slight alteration of the definition of fulfillment, however. Fulfilled is not synonymous with *easy* but rather hard work that comes to some good. I have been known to practically break my back working in the garden, but all of the hard work is worth it when I sit back and enjoy the peace and happiness I find in the finished project.

The same thing holds true for writing. It is not always easy, especially when I tackle topics that are either particularly close to me, or ones that I struggle to comprehend, but when I find the right words to say it – whatever it is – I feel a satisfaction that few other pursuits give me.

If you are really lucky, that thing that you are passionate about is also something at which you excel. For the Antonio Salieris of the world, this entire concept of passion mingled with work might not be a plausible idea.

If he wanted to bow out of politics, and specifically out of the health care reform issue, he’s got a pretty good excuse. But Senator Kennedy doesn’t seem  interested in making excuses at this juncture, calling health care reform “the cause of my life.” He has been an advocate for reform since taking office, forty-six years ago. He must be thinking at least in part, about his legacy.

On his 77th birthday, Ted Kennedy still works to realize a professional, and perhaps by this point also a personal goal. With treatments, and the illness itself taking its toll, I can imagine that many days it would be tempting to leave the fight, let another generation of socially-minded democrats take the reigns, but something drives him to push ahead. It is so inspiring to see someone work so hard, someone who could  easily rest on his laurels, soak in the accolades, and think, “I’ve done more than enough.” It makes me think, have I done nearly enough?

No, not even close. And so I start to think about what my legacy might be, knowing that every minute I have in this world is a gift and and this life comes without any sort of guarantee regarding length. Without a conscious effort, it is so easy to go through the motions, get lazy, take it all for granted. I’ll get to it tomorrow, or the day after that, or the day after that. Like marriage, you cannot expect to have a healthy and productive life by ignoring it. It is work, and it is work worth doing.

As I read about this very sick man -very much my senior- and his continued crusade,  I realized how much I have slipped in my determination to make every minute count. There is too little time to be paralyzed by the enormity of the tasks before me. Time to get to it.

The lesson taught by those of my grandparents generation was to never let your senses dull. There are no free rides, they would tell us, only hard work and resourcefulness would yield success. At what point did the entire country seemingly forget this common sense? Believe me, I am not wagging a finger at others. I am as guilty as anyone else. Are we, as humans, just hard-wired to have a short memory about the lessons of history? Isn’t that the definition of insanity – to keep doing the same things over and over thinking that one day they will yield a different result? Or is that just stupidity?

I think when situations finally turn dire, we suddenly remember the important things – in this case, things like overextending yourself with credit is going to turn out really badly, fudging numbers to get a loan does not negate the fact that you are buying something you really can’t afford, spending $4.50 on a cup of coffee is absurd. Now we find ourselves embarrassed, caught in the act of hedonistic consumption, scrambling to find ways to cut costs and divert our attention away from our rapidly shrinking stock portfolios.

I am writing this from my home office, my cat tucked behind me like a lumbar support pillow, both of us anxious to use the other for warmth. Most days I hole myself up in here, space heater on low, the heat for the rest of the house turned down. I think, W.W.G.D.? What Would Grandma Do? She certainly would have the thermostat turned down, but probably would have put on a sweater and gone without the space heater. She would also do what I was unable to do yesterday at the grocery store – just say no to $15 a pound coffee, forgo the wine with dinner, leave the chocolate chip mint ice cream in the grocer’s freezer. The $150 cable bill? She would have cancelled Comcast ages ago.

Moral of the story is, if my own habits are any example, we have a long way to go. Bailouts may be necessary, I really don’t know enough about such things to say, but the real change has to be made in our own mindset. Cheap coffee is a start, but the whole entitled attitude that permeates through our culture has got to stop. We aren’t owed a thing, people. I think that the way out of this is going to be a return to the hard-working way of our ancestors. President Obama has said what other politicians have been too afraid to say – he can’t do it alone, and it is going to take a lot of work and time to get back on track. We’ve got the lessons of a generation to study up on.  We’re backed into the corner, finally, which I think will make us very attentive students.

The seed catalogs will arrive soon. Cook’s Garden, Burpee, Park’s – the same ones that my father swore by I now wait for with great anticipation. Through some force of nature – osmosis likely – I have completely inherited my father’s love of gardening. As a very small girl I would listen intently to his instructions on growing plants. I would join him in the greenhouse when it came time to start the seeds that we would eventually harden off in pots, then plant in the ground.  I would pad along behind him as he sowed, watered, pruned, harvested. My little brain soaked up his words like fertilizer.

Later the attention deficit disorder known as adolescence would put an end to my apprenticeship. I left the old man out in his garden. I had more pressing business to attend to. But once the wild oats had all been sown, it was the feeling of warm earth in my palms that I was once again drawn toward. Living in a place that offered ample room for all sorts of growing, I was amazed at how much of my father’s lessons, taught so long ago, I could recall and put to use. Of course I learn something new every year. Like how to kill plants by fussing with them too much. Or forgetting that you have black dahlias in a certain corner and planting horribly clashing irises right next to them. I am always adding to my library of knowledge.

My father is a man of few words, unlike his daughter, but he has no shortage of things to say about the plants he loves, toils over, sometimes does battle with. I know that his favorite part of my visits home are the talks we have as we walk through his garden,  where he shares his triumphs and defeats with the one person he knows really understands. We speak in our own language. It is a bond we share with no one else in the family.

These early heralds of spring always remind me of my dad, his infinite patience, the care he shows all of nature’s creations (I recall standing awe-struck as he frantically tried to wash off the insecticide a neighbor had sprayed on newly hatched Cicadas before Dad had a chance to explain to him that some bugs were actually good). In his seventies now, he works his own patch of dirt with the same enthusiasm as ever.  I know he is going through the same rituals I am in these pre-spring days, and I look forward to talking to him about his own discoveries.  It’s nice to have someone who can get as excited as me over a tiny glimpse of green!

I went to the dress rehearsal on Wednesday, which was an opportunity to meet the rest of the cast and hear their material. We sat in a room that usually houses therapists and families in crisis (some of the Mortified producers are, fittingly, therapists). I think it is an appropriate setting for these seven strangers to meet and subsequently share their most outrageous adolescent thoughts and feelings. By the end we are practically friends, wiping away tears , rubbing faces sore from laughing, and complimenting each other on delivery as well as bravery. I leave no longer nervous, and very excited for the show.

Friday night, there was a full house at the Someday Lounge. We hung out in the “green room,” a cramped back room with a battered sofa and dorm room refrigerator filled with beer. I read over my excerpts, doing my best to memorize my introduction, and thought of my husband sitting out in the audience with so many of our friends, wearing his “I Love NJ” t-shirt in my honor. He was far more nervous for me than I was for myself. I hoped that he would recover quickly from the shock of hearing about my teenage love affairs. His high school experience – attending an all boys, Catholic boarding school – was so very different than my public school experience.

For a brief moment, waiting for my cue (my hugely blown up prom photo to appear on the screen on stage) I felt a bit of nervous energy, but still not the panic that I had foreseen. I walked out on stage to the hoots and howls of my wonderfully supportive friends. I could barely see a thing through the stage lights, and definitely couldn’t see John or any other familiar faces. I began to read, and the audience began to laugh, at all the appropriate places. I read on, beginning to enjoy it more and more. Some of this stuff really was funny, it turns out, even if it at the same time was so completely cringe worthy. I was hooked. I loved being Mortified.

Night #2 brought a writer from the Oregonian, writing a piece on the burgeoning phenomenon that is Mortified. He asked each of us what we got out of doing this. I thought about it for a moment – the way I carried those books around for so many years, my secret shame. I told him in a nutshell that this experience had allowed me to look at it from a grown up perspective. I was sixteen years old. It was time to forgive myself for not knowing any better, for being a kid. Standing before an audience that offered me roaring laughter and thunderous applause – a group of people so obviously rooting for my 16-year old self-  also gave me the chance to appreciate the humor, the poignancy, and the random thought that might even be called insightful, also contained in those pages. Given the chance, I would do it again in a heartbeat. Lord knows I’ve got plenty more material!

Not so this time. I will  always remember where I was on January 20, 2009, when Barack Obama was sworn in as the 44th president of the United States. Unfortunately, I’ll have to recall that I was unemployed and watching it on tv wearing my  my pink fuzzy bathrobe and sobbing  into my cat’s fur, but still. The tears I shed for this historic moment were tears of joy, relief, and a hope for our collective future that I haven’t felt in my lifetime.

I will remember how I sat, nodding my head in agreement as he said, “The time has come to reaffirm our enduring spirit; to choose our better history,” and  “the stale political arguments that have consumed us for so long no longer apply,” and also, “We have duties…that we do not grudgingly accept but rather seize gladly, firm in the knowledge that there is nothing so satisfying to the spirit, so defining of our character, than giving our all to a difficult task.”

I felt Obama channelling FDR, MLK, JFK. Absent were the promises of how he would fix what ails us, or how the government would right all the wrongs, but instead he spoke of how we would make the changes necessary to get our country and in turn the community of the world, back on track. This is what we needed to hear – that there is no quick fix and he will not make promises that he knows, just as well as we do, he would not be able to keep. I have, like most of the inhabitants of this country, become complacent, entitled, lost. As the helicopter carrying the former president lifted off, there was a  lift from my own chest – a physical rise above the feeling of helplessness and into a new realm of empowerment.

This really is a new day, a new chance for not only our country but each individual to get back to the ideals we have strayed so far from. This is a moment in history that I am so hopeful that I will remember in this way – that it was the beginning of a return to personal accountability, a government to be proud of, and most of all, a return to greatness in the most righteous sense of the word.

Yes we can!

Which is why I was so puzzled by the fact that outside my window last week  everything I saw was blanketed in soft, powdery snow. In the street lights I could see the flakes fluttering down, swirling in chaotic patterns in the wind. There were probably five inches on the ground, and that was just the beginning.

Everyone was shocked and the city has virtually shut down. I saw a few plows about, but none with plow down, trying to clear the roads. Everyone seemed to be waiting for direction from someone more experienced. When to start the clean up? Should we wait until it stops? And, considering that once the rain starts in Oregon it usually lasts for stretches of 30 days or more, when should we expect this snow to really stop?  Most stores were closed or were kept open by a skeleton crew of employees who could walk to work – so desperate were the merchants to have something, anything, that resembled the holiday shopper traffic they’d enjoyed in economically more stable years.  My girlfriend, a masseuse, begged me to brave the cold to come sit in her shop for an hour while she gave a massage in hopes that some last minute shoppers would come in to buy gift certificates. No such shoppers came on my watch, unfortunately.

My personal reaction to the cataclysmic-by-Portland-standards weather event surprised me. Since my hasty flight from the Northeast five years ago,  I would shudder at the mere sight of frozen precipitation on television. My winter battle cry was always, “never again.” Portland is no Hawaii, but it was really hardly cold in comparison to New Jersey, and just about as cold as I was willing to endure. But this weird cold snap – temperatures in the 20′s followed by the snow – was actually a really nice experience for me. I think part of it was due to the fact that it was all around Christmas. I have always been a sucker for all things traditional. To be able to trek through the streets of a city festooned in holiday dress and brightest whiteness, was a true Dickensian dream for me. Economic downturn or not, the streets during those snowy days were teeming with flushed-faced folks, hugging overstuffed shopping bags, who seemed to go out of their way to peer over their packages to smile and meet the eye of every passerby. In silence we all conveyed the same message to one another; “Can you believe this? Isn’t it kind of great?”

Now, on January 2nd, the only remnants of the Great Storm of ’08 that remain are lonely, blackened, gutter icebergs here and there. In another month the early signs of spring will be all about – snowdrops and crocuses appearing in yards and hillsides, and our next snow event might be years away. It was really nice while it lasted, but I am still glad that its tenure was short.