Anniversaries

I am bad about anniversaries. We always seem to be so broke in time for them, my beloved used to be working on many of them,and it seems unseemly to make a big deal out of surviving and not driving each other crazy. I guess when most folks have been married 20 years, maybe they throw a big party, or go out someplace romantic for dinner. But we are so decidedly unconventional. So after 20 years,of good times and bad, we grab one of my oldest friends from the airport--someone who knew me when I was not yetfully formed, someone from halfway round the world who passes through once every few years, and I forced my ornery children who know my most recent history, and we all DINED together, worlds and times mixing like a ride in a TARDIS, at a fun place like Chicago's Province, a place that is green from its walls to its cuisine. A dining experience that puts our money where our mouth is in our shrinking world.

Dining, as I always say, is what makes us, as a species, civilized. And on a purely personal level, its also what makes up the scrapbook of memories in my life--my absolute best memories have always had a meal involved--whether its our yearly insanity of Cinco De Mayo at our family haunt, Las Palmas,or the Easter Brunch at Va Pensiero I recently blogged about. I have some mellowed and beloved memories of stellar Thanksgiving dinners, of Passover Seders, of my sister in law's beloved Very British Christmas Dinner with Yorkshire Pudding. Think about your best times, and I bet somewhere in there, there is a memorable meal.

I do not actually remember the meal at our wedding---I was too strung out and exhausted to have eaten it. I do remember the meal we had on our first honeymoon--- a drive to Michigan with the old dog and the new dog, and pasta at a roadside dive where the sign boasted Its A Boy. We now have a house out there and we still call the place Itsaboy.
When we came into a windfall, we took another honeymoon---to Spain. I remember a wonderful seaside cafe where we ate Langostinos (lobster) but the BEST meal we had was at a campground on the sea where we ate a chicken we bought from a roadside rotisserie and drank wine we had picked up from a monastery with a huge line outside.
When we opened the bottle we knew why---and almost drove 60 kilometers back to get more.

It was so fitting to share the occasion of arriving at two decades together at table with people who can see the long telescope of the lives we have made. My friend watched wide-eyed as my child slurped oysters. We have "unusual" children with wide ranging pallets which is befitting the offspring of artists, I suppose. When you are in a party of 5 instead of a party of two, it really BECOMES a party, and you can order whatever you want to try, knowing someone else will most likely help you finish it. So we sampled and tried and ate off each others plates and talked and laughed. It was fun to find out, after nearly 3 decades of knowing each other, that my friend and I both love lamb with guilty pleasure--which got eye rolls from the kids. And it was rich oh so rich to watch my mate of two decades teach his children how to prepare an oyster, a delicacy that will, I am afraid, always be lost to me. The chef sent us out champagne, and we toasted to each other's long lives and future.
All too soon, the evening came to an end. The city of Chicago complied with the occasion and gave the streets we walked out onto a lovely sheen from the rain. In the film biz, its called a Wet Down--- a picture perfect shiny evening. We dropped my pal at his hotel, kids passed out in the back.
I cannot believe it has been 20 years. Life goes by so fast. Appreciate it, and try not to dine alone. Thank you my world traveling friend, for making us mark the occasion in such a memorable way.

Arts Education

As school districts across the state slash and burn their budgets as their ships sink in this perfect storm of property tax caps and state budget crisis, the first barrel to go overboard is arts programming. I for one would like to see consultants, administrators and 5 kinds of standardized testing walk the plank, but unfortunately, in our collective race to the bottom, that will not happen. I know how bad its getting, because at the Arts Magnet school in my town, my daughter is getting a substandard arts experience--the arts classes are not integrated into the overall curriculum, they don't have them every day the way one would have reading or maths, and they are severely underfunded. The PTA steps up and so do I, but what about all the kids who don't have artist parents with the means to pay for enrichment?

I was cleaning out my files and found the state of Kansas' 1995 Guidelines for Program Development in Music. It made me cry. My daughter is on grade level according to their rubrics, but only because I sink thousands of dollars a year into private lessons, music concert subscriptions, and parking costs to take her to our privately funded choir performances. The music program described as the standard for public education in this document is a dream deferred for 90% of the schools in my state, which is not Kansas.

Music is the language of our souls, and what will happen to a society which does not teach this language to its children? We are starving our children not only with the horrible food that passes as school lunches, but in the arts starved curricula we provide them---there are no "nutrients" for their spirits.

In an age which demands creativity and metathinking, the unenriched curriculum will have dire economic consequences for the next generation. But more than economic poverty, I fear the kind of disaffected, disconnnected, small minded poverty of imagination that is like a virus in some of our youth. It's because in the banquet of life and art and mind, we aren't feeding them anything with true energy in it.

And so I will pick through this Kansas Document and try to create my own little OZ,here, with my programs and my habits, to make sure the children I am responsible for are dining at the finest banquet of arts and mind. I want their imaginations to grow FAT with ideas and inspirations.

poem

There is no precious
Anymore
Just stuff
In barrels, boxes, crates
Organized
And More
And more
So much more
And so cheap that
No one cares,
Overflowing
Abundance
Yet, but
Destitute.


We hoard because we
Want.
There is no need
Except the need like a hunger that is
Never
Satisfied, still chewing on the inside
And swallowing, black hole
Down the gullet, grind
Down that satisfaction till it’s a
Skinny
Starving
Never sleeping
Desire.

Let it go.
Let it go.
Make a space for something new and small.
Open
Give up the
Clutch and Cling.
Clean the slate
So you are New and
Possible.

More will always come your way.

Identity Crisis

This wild west Blogosphere has me in a pickle. I mean WHO AM I? As a blogger, am I a member of the media, with the responsibilities of impartialism and fact checking that come with being a journalist? Am I an educator, explaining odd things? Am I a pr person whose primary responsibility is to promote products and experiences? Am I Consumer Reports for my demographic profile? Am I a kind of focus group of One? Or am I simply a memoir writer, who gives personal opinions and recounts what has happened to me, a storyteller?

As this new social media/blogoworld/tweet/youtube world evolve I don't think many of us really know who we are, or how we fit in, or what our mission is. I have some friends who consult about all this, and some who have turned their entire lives into product placement ops, and some who tweet constantly and frankly, I am exhausted by it all. So much information---so little time. I think its like any new technology where it takes us a while to figure it out, but meanwhile, I feel unsettled. I have landed in an alien environment and am not sure what the rules are.

I attended a twitter party, meet up, trade show thingy which was wonderful, but its clear how confused I am because even after I went to the event, I am not sure what to call it.

It was like a trade show for me, since I learned all kinds of things, like you can get amazing pretty cupcakes at some Cinnabons, and Garret Popcorn should be my gift to all foreign visitors now that Frango mints are NOT made here anymore. I also had a lengthy conversation about Energizer batteries. I learned that rechargeables DONT NEED TO BE COMPLETELY drained any more which is a huge relief in a house where stuff practically feeds on double A's. And I also learned about a great contest they are having for kids making videos that I will feature on Mamamedia. I signed up to be a lab rat for breast cancer, though I HATE that they call the project an army. I went home with gorgeous gifts---not sure what it says about me that I really really really wanted the schlage lockset but the day was a bad neglectful mommy day for me, leaving my kids to work out their schedule and practice independence with some spectacular system failures, so I felt guilty taking things. I won a raffle prize and didn't pick it up, because I just don't deserve STUFF. Of course, the eBay folks did give me a beautiful Label maker so I can organize my stuff--though my kids will probably walk off with it. I didn't know eBay did classifieds, so that's something else I learned. I like learning about all this stuff in one swoop, and getting a glass of Mr. Chardonnay while I am studying. And eventually someone will want to know something about something I have learned---my readers, you know this. How many of you have asked me, what's the best whatever, whatever? Being the quirky,demographic anomaly that I like to think I am, I like discovering things, and taking my time to get to know them and forming an opinion about them.

I think I feel more comfortable as a storyteller. So until further notice, lets just stick with that. And I need to get back to being a poet.

Best Birthday Ever

It started a month ago: What do you want for your birthday, mom? It's kind of a joke actually, because every year for every holiday I ask for exactly the same thing.
A Clean House.
My mom got savvy a while back and started booking our old housekeeper to come in every year for my birthday and for the winter holidays. It's easy and always the right color and fit.

The sad thing is, I am serious. It IS what I really want. Its hard enough for me to figure out what I want, when the family has so many needs. And I certainly don't usually dare ask for what I want. Not getting it hurts too much. Still when I look in my heart, what I really want is a clean house. A clean house means I am free to read a book or do something interesting. A house already put together means I can move on, and not be weighed down by the the Awful Should Do's. Every week I finish a full week at work and have to come home and put in another 20 hours just keeping our house from being a health hazard.

But this year, something was different. Maybe this birthday is a big enough number that I can hear the clock ticking. I know the show does not go on forever. And maybe this year, I don't just want a clean house, I NEED a clean house. My world, organized.

And so I asked. But I didn't ask my family. I framed up a little email request, and I asked my dearest girl friends to help me. It was really really hard to ask-- I had the thing on my computer for weeks before I dared to mail it. I am not the one who needs things--I have spent a lifetime in the counter role: the one who rescues and fixes.

I have no problem accessing professional help when I need it. But asking a friend for a favor is really hard for me. Perhaps it is the pioneer stock, the midwestern ethic--it is a mark of one's strength to go it alone. But for my birthday I gave myself the gift of asking.

And so they arrived, in sweats and jeans, ready to roll up their sleeves, and roll em up they did. After 3 hours, I called them off, and we ate lasagna with a celebratory glass of wine, and surveyed their gift: a completely reorganized and decluttered front room, and a kitchen wall of appliances suitable for a photo in a lifestyle magazine. I felt lighter than air, happy, as I took the garbage bags to the trash and loaded the cast offs into the Amvets donation box. A morning of work did not give me an entire house, but it started a process of paring down, of unblocking my chi, of lightening my load, and this process is long overdue in my life.

As this birthday is solidly in middle age, I come to grips with all the things I might not have time for, but there are many things I chose not to have time for: toxic people, stuff that no longer serves me, and patterns that hold me down. The gift of time that my friends gave me was so precious and will last forever--and it will never need dusting.

At the end of my birthday weekend, my youngest daughter asked me, as I ask each of my children each year on their special day, Was it a Good Birthday? It was, it was.
THANK YOU.

Wearin' O The Green

My people are more Celtic Scottish than Irish, and in the end, if I felt like forking over the bucks for DNA analysis, probably more Ancient Russian tribal with its Asian roots and Teutonic embellishments, but on St. Pat's everyone within striking distance of Chicago is Irish. And so we wear our glowing green, and I paint on Shamrocks and don my ridiculous hats. And I sip a Jameson and read some McCourt in a quiet place.

I have been to the Emerald Isle thrice. It always feels like home. I feel like I am on a very long road to get back to a flat in Galway, or a cottage on the western coast, where fairies might live amid the moss, and the lilt of the speech and the sadness of the tunes gets into my very bones and feels like my own heartbeat. The Irish are a race of tale tellers, and there is something quite old and tribally, limnally very human about them.

So lift a glass to me homeys today.

Elegies

Last week, on facebook, my neighbor found out she had lost an entire branch of her family tree in a fiery crash on a highway in Israel. I am not certain that is the best use of social media, but I also understand the impulse of wanting to get the inconceivable horrible piece of information out as painlessly as possible, and not wanting to tell the horror over and over again. My friend is still stunned. How could this happen--how could your cousin put his wife and two young kids on a plane to visit family and just never come back. In an instant, in an instant, three generations gone. What do you DO with that kind of a loss? I lost my father that way--in the seventh grade, I went off to school, he went off to work, peck on the cheek,and he dropped dead of a heart attack. Gone. I never said goodbye. I never told him how very much I loved him. And still, every day I miss him. Life is that fragile. We don't think about it every moment of the day, because we would go mad, but in a sense, we remain aware of this tragic fact of existence. We live, we die, and sometimes the transition happens in a second, and there is no time for proper passage.

I attended a class of sixth graders this week introduced to the poetic form: Elegy. It was clear that the poem read as an example of the form got to the kids in a way that a typical educational level lecture never could.

And it was equally clear, that many of these children had sustained significant losses. It is not possible to live as a human on this planet for more than a couple of years without suffering painful, altering loss--whether it is to lose your grandmother, a family pet, or your favorite stuffed animal. One of my children has sobbed over growing out of a favorite shirt---I am losing my childhood! I was told. How many mamas miss the babies we once held--bewildered by the grown people they become? Our existences will be marked by loss. Gain as well, but also irreversible loss. My daughter always becomes very distant and cold towards her pets when they get older---if you call her on it she breaks down racked by crying----she doesn't want to love them so much because they are going to die.

Pets can be especially hard,since their lifespans can be short. I did the same exercise that the students in the class did, and wrote this:


The Last Dog

We ran so many forests
Woody and I.
His golden coat shimmering
In afternoon dappled light.
His big grin and tongue lolling.

Now the trees do not call me so much any more,
Without his peppy bark
Urging me onward.

There are other dogs running with me now,
Butterscotch and chocolate brutes

But not retrievers.

I love them also,
But I have not forgotten
My feathered golden friend with deep sad eyes
My boon companion

The thing I have been unable to convince my daughter is that to hold back love is to miss the good part of the tragedy of our fragile and always too short lives. That the loving itself is the payoff, and the compensation for the pain of the loss. You
lose the experience of the person in your daily life but you never lose the memory of having loved.

Be sure to speak that love to those in your life, because you never know when the ongoing narrative of a life will come suddenly to an end. Just make sure the story is as filled with love as it can be and SAY that love. For those left behind,
especially if there is no chance to say goodbye, it is the gift that we are left with.

And remember. They have not died until the last person who remembers them has died.