Slug and Boots

    At flute choir last night, I got a little lost in the reminiscing about the Buzzard Ballet, which has a line similar to The Nutcracker, which reminded someone of “The Enchanted Eggplant,” but I do know that Kim said our notes were a little sluggish.  Wanting to participate in this fascinating stream of consciousness, I helpfully pointed out that I write about slugs.  And then Vic told his slug story.

    If I remember correctly, he was camping, and one morning when he put his boots on, he encountered something rather large and squishy:  a slug.  Just imagine the slimy mess left on that socked foot as he drew it out of the boot to investigate.  Other slug experts may already know what he discovered:  it is incredibly difficult to clean slug off one’s sock and out of one’s boot.  Evidently, slug remains do not respond to water; the proteins don’t break down.

    Here we will leave Vic working on slug clean-up and turn to a shocking realization of mine concerning flute choir:  we have never played a flute piece dedicated to slugs.  We’ve performed Flutes and Vegetables  (which included “The Enchanted Eggplant”) and we are working on a wildflower march, but there is a noticeable absence of slugs as inspiration for flute music.

    Surely slugs have something to offer.  Definitely, they pose a challenge.  How do you present the essence of slug in a piece of fine music?  How could you musically capture their slime and their slowness?  What would a world be without slugs?  What redeeming or comedic value could be the basis for a slug composition?

    Sadly, my capabilities do not include composing, but there must be someone out there with a heart for slugs and the burning desire to honor them with song.  It occurs to me that Vic’s slug story could be told in a musical medley.  A proper slug tune would be a plodding piece with directions to play moving notes (if there are any) sluggishly.  Perhaps there could be some clashing, keen musical drama in order to capture the soul’s dissonance as one discovers the slug slime embedded in the boot.  Naturally, after the height of musical but sluggish emotion, there must be a resolution . . . but how do you recreate clinging slime?  Maybe some glissandos could capture its lingering essence.  And what would you name the piece?  Slug ‘n Boots?  Ode to Slug?  Titles aside, it is suddenly clear to me that the alto and bass flute parts would be well suited to fully express the low, round tones of a slug in motion.  The piccolo could provide some frantic, high-pitched peaks for the first glimpse of smashed slug.  And dissonant chords would well represent the problem of slime removal.

    There, Vic.  I almost have it written, save the actual notes.

Laundry Wars

    The laundry wars have recommenced after a four-month truce.  Translated:  the shop office laundry set-up has been invaded by my mother.

    For the four months she was puzzled about where laundry operations had moved, I had the front line all to myself.  But now, she has gradually moved in and resumed resorting of my efforts.
 
    In the interest of peace, I met her halfway as she delivered the washed cougar towels from John’s house by providing an empty basket for their deposit.  I even unloaded the dry jeans and put the wet towels in the dryer—minus the two odorous, stained, unwashed cleaning rags that were wound up with the clean towels.  And I held my tongue as she started to resort the dirty laundry, undoing my previous efforts.  Our sorting ideas differ, along with our perceptions of color. 

    As I walked back to our house with the load of clean jeans for her to fold, my emotional state was fraught with tension.  It appears that I am not immune to territorial invasions.  And I don’t want to see any more of my clothing go missing in action.

From June 28

    This morning I found two M & Ms:  one on the bathmat and the other on top of the dirty clothes.  I surreptitiously washed strawberries as well.

I feel myself tensing up at about the third time in as many minutes that Mom makes the same comment or asks the same question.  The well-worn conversational loops are starting to wear my patience thin:  for example, hearing the same remark about an article in Time every minute or less as she reads the same few lines after stopping to comment on them.  I smile and nod when she tells me there is a lot of work she still has to do in the shop just moments after she tells me she finished all her work in the shop. 

    It’s the repetition that gets me.  Last night was the excitement over the strawberries she picked:  “What a wonderful crop . . . I love how they clean themselves—see how the tops came off so perfectly when I picked them . . . We should make jam . . . Do we have any pectin? . . . What a wonderful crop . . . I love how they clean themselves—see how the stems came off so perfectly . . . We should make jam . . . Do we have any pectin? . . . What a wonderful crop . . . “

    Even while I am irritated, I am grateful that Mom is, for the most part, happy.  I’m glad she can do as much as she can.  I’m glad to be of help.  I’m glad to find the M & Ms before they are washed.  But the thing that makes me happiest of all is thoroughly rinsing the strawberries she put in the slug bait spreader before we eat them.

Nails

    Fingernails and toenails take a long time.

    On Friday I took the plunge and bought some pricey nail conditioner with the hope it will actually moisturize and strengthen my fragile nails as well as preserve my nail polish efforts.

    I am the type to occasionally slap on a layer of nail polish and call it good.  Saturday afternoon, though, I did it right:  one coat of Nutra Nail Total Nail Care, followed by two coats of Avon Speed Dry Nail Enamel, followed by another coat of the Nutra Nail stuff.  That was a lot of computer time, the only way I can handle waiting for each coat to dry.  Usually, I am too impatient and nick an edge of polish off at least one nail. 

    If this four-coat technique works, it will be a very long time before I change nail color.  I figure that four coats will be a chore to scrub off with that horrible-smelling nail polish remover.  If the color peels or rubs off like it usually does once I actually do anything, it will be back to the slap and dash method again.

    . . . Saturday's dinner preparation and kitchen clean-up resulted in one chip and one scratch, a little discouraging but not as bad as usual.  By Sunday evening, the top edges of pink had worn off despite my day of rest.  Oh, by the way, the chip and scratch and the wearing-off of color were on the fingernails.  I haven’t checked my toenails yet.
   

Whole Wheat Bliss

Whole wheat bliss is this:
frosted cinnamon roll,
warm and sweet.

Cakewalk

Dictionary.com Word of the Day:
Cakewalk:  something easily accomplished

    School carnivals:  I remember the excitement of those annual events at East Elementary in Grandville, Michigan.  Every classroom held a new experience.  I remember “fishing”: casting your line behind the curtain, where a tug signaled it was time to reel in with your prize.  Then, there was the picking up of cheery yellow plastic ducks propelled along in a stream.  That one felt like a baby game, but the happy anticipation was still there:  maybe this time I would get the duck number matched with the really good prize.  The room with a line, though, was always the ball toss to dunk the principal.

    And, of course, the cakewalk version of musical chairs.  The music—often some scratched record--would begin and I would carefully circle with the crowd around in front of the chairs.  The trick was to keep moving while also being aware of just where the next chair was.  Then, the music would stop, and . . .

    Oops, wrong game.  So let’s start again.  The music would begin and I would carefully walk the circle path of squared-off numbers, stepping carefully from numbered square to numbered square, a little slowly and jerkily as I listened hard for the end of the music.  And then the music stopped and everyone was on a different number for a different prize.  How I wished with all my might that this time I would win that really yummy iced two-layer cake.  That was the prize that would send me down the hallway looking for Mom to take my cake so I could use up the last of my tickets on some favorite game.

    Carnivals ended with a wrought-up excitement over the fun of the evening tinged with a lingering disappointment over some prize not won.  There was the excited chatter and one-upmanship of the short drive home as we compared best prizes.  I clutched my little paper lunch bag of trinkets and candy to carefully go through later.  And, if one of us had been lucky, there was the two-layer cake waiting for tomorrow.

A Doe Greeted Me

A doe greeted me yesterday as I drove down the driveway. I slowed to a stop when I saw her.  It seemed, for a second, that she recognized me.  Or maybe it was the tan of my Ford Focus that tricked her into thinking I was some round relative, for she took two hesitant steps forward.  Then, stopping and still intently staring, she reconsidered and bounded into the woods.

The Periphery of Praise

Too long I lived in the center of insecurity,
Dabbling in doubt,
Hesitant before heaven,
Treading lightly to leave no footprints,
Closing myself out of joy:
Existing in the periphery of praise.

Now praise to the King is the center of my being,
The fullness of joy gifted
By holy hands that bled for me.

The Seventh Summer

    In July 2004, I tripped running up the stairs and dislocated my right shoulder.

    In June 2005, Jack fell down the stairs and broke his right hip and right wrist.  My mother fell down in the bathroom due to a bleeding gastro-stromal tumor.  Jack had hip replacement and wrist surgery in Hays, Kansas.  Mom had half her stomach removed in Coupeville, Washington.

    In June 2006, Jack had his infected right hip hardware taken out in Wichita, Kansas.  In August my sister had debulking surgery for stage IIIc ovarian cancer in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.   In September, in Wichita again, Jack had the surgery to implant his new hip hardware.  In October in Denver, I had my ovaries and Fallopian tubes removed (bilateral salpingo oorphectomy) because of complex cysts which, fortunately, turned out to be benign.

    In July 2007, my sister and I visited Mom and John here on Whidbey Island.  We didn’t know it at the time, but Anne’s cancer would recur in September.

    In June 2008, I moved to Whidbey Island.  My sister’s cancer recurred again in September.

    May 22, 2009, saw me flying to Tulsa, Oklahoma right after the premature birth of my grandson.  After his month in NICU, he came home all hooked up to oxygen.  After five days visiting my son in Colorado Springs, I got back home to Whidbey on July 5.  Three weeks later I found myself in the air again to visit my sister in intensive care at UNC Memorial Hospital.  A five-day visit wasn’t enough, so I stayed with her until she died in October.

    In this short history, I’ve left out several of Anne’s recurrences of cancer and her multiple chemotherapy regimens.  I’ve also left out Benjamin’s open heart surgery, hernia surgery, treatment for infantile spasms, and his recent fitting for hearing aids.  I’ve left out John’s sinus surgery, Mom’s shots in the eye to slow her macular degeneration, her outpatient laser eye surgery, and my bouts with bronchitis.

    I’ve also left out why I feel compelled to record these six summers of medical crises.  That’s probably because I don’t know.  What keeps running through my mind, though, is this:  A June ago, my sister was alive and now she’s dead.  My grandson was critically ill but now he is healthy. 

    I hope to spend this seventh summer in remembrance of my dear sister and in celebration of my sweet grandson.  However, I hope to do both right here at home in Washington.
   

I am still surprised

I am still surprised when people like me.
I am still surprised at the easy feeling of self-confidence.
I am still surprised to have the shackles loosened at my feet.
I am still surprised by joy.

In the Tradition of Sherlock Holmes

    I believe I have solved another mystery:  the origin of the brown blotches on my favorite chinos.
    Let me hasten to explain that those blotches, which first appeared to be permanent some months ago, faded away in the course of several washings.  Said chinos are still in use, though I am experiencing another problem with them—which I may detail later.

    Using my keen deductive reasoning, I arrived at the answer without even having to pose the question.  In the tradition of Sherlock Holmes, I quietly observed all available data and patiently waited for the pieces to fall together.  They did, just this morning.

    The conversation played out at the kitchen table, inspired by the 56 ounce bag of M & M’s.  (We purchase said candies in bulk for my mother, who has an insatiable sweet tooth.  Keeping plenty of chocolate handy helps her maintain her 92 pound weight.)

    Had I been less alert, I would have missed the significance of her happy comment about her hitherto unknown habit of keeping a few M & M’s in her pants pockets for easy consumption at any time.  “Ah,” I thought, “mystery solved.”

    For any Watsons out there, here is the simple trail of reasoning:  hidden M & M’s washed and dried with a load of light-colored clothing may result in brown stains on some items.

    The other problem, which seems unlikely in the presence of M & M’s, is that said chinos are now a size too big for me.  However, I am not complaining.

"You Don't Send Me Emails Anymore"

    It started with a stray line, as most ideas do:  “you don’t send me emails anymore.”  From there I found the lyrics to “You Don’t Send Me Flowers,” an old Neil Diamond song.  It didn’t take long to compose new lyrics as I contemplated the song, which, fortunately, wasn’t too concerned with rhyme.  I used as many of the original words as possible in my parody.  This is what I do for entertainment on a Saturday night.

You don’t send me emails
You don’t check my blog
You hardly tweet me anymore
When you check your messages
At the end of the day

I remember when
You couldn’t wait to text me
Even when you were next to me
Now after tweetin’ me late at night
When it’s good for you
And you’re feelin’ alright
Well you just power down
No more IM tonight
And you don’t send me emails anymore

It used to be so natural
To text to u “4ever”
But “u’s 2 b’s” don’t count anymore
They just sit on the screen
‘Til we backspace away

And baby, I remember
All the things you taught me
I learned how to forward
And I learned how to tweet
Well I learned how to love
And I learned to delete
Well you’d think I could learn
How to text you goodbye
And you don’t send me emails anymore

Well you’d think I could learn
How to text you goodbye
You don’t say you read me
You don’t hear my ringtone
You don’t send me emails anymore

Why I need a voice recorder

Words write themselves in empty space
Where imagination hums,
Thrumming like hummingbirds
Suspended in time—
And sweeping from memory all trace
Of their perfected lines

don't ask me where this came from/i won't be offended if you pretend you don't know me

Less than ten,
More like five rhythmic minutes of kitchen sweeping--
Away! Gritty layer of weeks!

    She’s  feeling a bit like Walt Whitman or some sea-grizzled captain.

Less than five,
More like two steady minutes of back and forth
Capture of hallway carpet dirt.

    Singlehandedly, she’s taking hostage the pine needles.

No sense in delay,
Her shoulder complains
To prepare for later and louder laments.

    Needles and grit overboard!  All hands to deck!  Blindfold ‘er,
    Let ‘er follow the scum!




   

I'd Rather Write

    I’d rather write than clean.

    The floors are atrocious, dirty witnesses of neglect.  Some of the neglect could quickly be swept up:  the stray pine needles, sand, dead carpenter ants, and ever-present dirt that gets tracked in from the woods.  Some of the neglect is permanent: the carpet stains from elderly cat misses and bleeding baby rabbits.  All of it overwhelms me. 

    Sweeping and vacuuming are the two worst things to do to my back and shoulders and arms.  A little goes a long way.  On the days I delude myself into thinking just a few minutes won’t hurt, it doesn’t—until a couple hours later.  Even delayed pain is pretty good positive reinforcement for ignoring the filth under my feet.

    When my Kansas pension plan kicks in later this year, perhaps I should set aside a sum for weekly floor maintenance.  Actually, I’d like to include bathroom cleaning with the floors because scrubbing is another arm-unfriendly task.  As I’ve said before, I prefer limiting pain-causing activities to things I love:  flute playing and essay writing.

    And even with those, I exercise a modicum of caution.  For example, because this afternoon is the senior dance band rehearsal, I will not practice my flute this morning.  However, I’ve never figured out how to stay away from the computer keyboard.

Untitled Poem

With flooding relief whispered loss:
A silent sadness,
Release and farewell
Acknowledged, then gone,
Breathed out into skylit promise
As the swell of joy buoyed me up,
Rose me praising to the Son.

Segueing

    I prefer to retain the final “e”:  segueing.

    I prefer my personal mispronunciation to the dictionary’s correctness:  SAY-ging to seg-WAY-ing.

    I love the definition from my Pocket Oxford:  “(in music and film) move without interruption from one song or scene to another.”

    I know how hard it is to segue effortlessly: to turn the page without missing a note, to glide seamlessly from one life scene to the next.  Quickly turning the page I can occasionally manage; gliding into the next era takes more time.

    I’ve often thought I should be able to execute a graceful ballerina leap into the future.  Or I’ve tried to draw a sharp line between scenes, sort of like those black boundary lines I used to imagine between states.

    This time, though, I’ve been segueing for two years in a slow transition from English instructor to writer, from Kansan to Washingtonian, from separated to single.  The most important segue I’ve not yet mentioned-- even though it is the central one, the one enacted under the best Director.

    That is the segue from disbelief to faith and depression to joy. 

Wurdz

I would like to coin a word:  wurdz.

Wurdz is like what you say ungrammatically.  But if you say wurdz, you don’t know what “ungrammatically” means (and probably won't notice the subject-verb agreement errors in this post.)

Wurdz is what is exchanged in texts.  Not books, but phones.  Wurdz like “u” and “lol” and “omg.”  Wurdz says a little in a little space.  The ultimate use of wurdz is tweets.

Wurdz is peer slang understood by peers as real words.  Wurdz changes with age and location and technology.  Sometimes they crowd out real words.

By coining “wurdz,” I establish myself as prudish protector of language.  I used to cross out wurdz in my students’ compositions and replace them with words. 

With wurdz I can make the superficial look cool.  Wurdz can cover up my lack of vocabulary and deficiency of thought.

But wurdz is also universally understood.  Real words that communicate subtleties sometimes require dictionaries.  Real words can get you in trouble with the wurdz world—like the infamous use of “niggardly” that unfairly triggered racial slur charges.

Real words communicate a world of ideas.  They find their finest expression in poetry and the poetic turn of phrase.  Carefully crafted, they create epiphany in the reader.  Badly used, they cause an almost physical pain.

I favor words to wurdz.  As our world shrinks due to portable technology, let’s expand our creativity to spill over the unused space instead of confining communication to two-inch screens. 

The Ants Are Marching, One By One

June marks the annual ant invasion here at Casa Del Gato. 

One by one, the carpenter ants find their way from the woods into our houses.  I don’t mind seeing and smashing them on the floor, but when I find one climbing my arm I mind a lot. 

Carpenter ants always bring back memories.  In our sunny orange 70s kitchen in Douglas, Michigan,  I remember John pouring a bowl of ants instead of pre-sweetened cereal.  I remember Bob practicing his best rubber band shooting skills, killing the ants one by one at the sink.  And I remember Mom suddenly jumping up from the table and then returning to tell us she had just bitten an ant instead of a crumb, and it (the ant) bit back.

The only redeeming feature of carpenter ants is that they are easy to see for the kill.  The crunch of their exo-skeleton under my shoe is a little gross, though. 

It’s time to call the exterminator.

Eagle Sighting

Eleven a.m. today was a perfect time to walk the tidal flats of Double Bluff Beach:  low tide, cloudless blue sky, everything sunshine, snow-capped peaks across the Sound.  Walking barefoot where sand finally met water, I saw an eagle land.  I stopped to watch, waiting for him to take flight, never expecting what happened next . . . 

I saw an eagle pee today.  He was
standing on surf-slapped shore
in the company of sea gulls.
A lifted backfeather,
a clear splashy stream,
then wings lifting him to flight.
He circled, higher, higher,
casting shadow long after
I lost him to the sun.

Highlights

    My degrees—BAMA--rhyme with our President.

    Yesterday I turned my head, not willing to see Mom place the moldy sweet potato on top of the dirty laundry.

    Later, I brought her a sustaining beverage (Ensure) as she worked in the garden, energetically digging up what she planted a couple weeks ago.

    I bought fresh blueberries at the grocery store.

    I lost a handful of poetic phrases because I didn’t get them written down.  I need to get a voice recorder that will survive showers and also fit into my purse for the car.

    I felt a little restless and bored but not enough to clean house.  When I practiced my concert flute, I discovered strained muscles in my left hand.  I’d rather not strain my muscles more with housework, but I don’t mind the pain as much if it is from doing something I love--playing my flutes or writing at the computer.

    Those are the highlights from June 10.

Anne's Parting Shot

    Deciding to drive to Barnes & Noble for a coffee break, I did not know my sister would be dead within the hour.  What I knew then was this:  she was in process of dying, but no one could say how long she might linger.  After two months of hospital vigil, I knew that I needed still to take breaks to store up strength.  So when I felt a surge of joy and suddenly knew Anne would wholeheartedly endorse me using her debit card for a very early Christmas gift  (a couple books) for myself from her, I was pleasantly energized and anticipated telling her about it when I returned to her hospital room.  But she died during my coffee break.  I never got to the books.
    It didn’t take me long at all to understand that moment of joy from an enlarged perspective.  I remembered the sense of her pausing with me as I drove, free and happy, her long-hair, slender twenty-something energetic self again.  As I thought further about the time of that surprising joy, I realized it was no more than thirty minutes before her death.

    Now when I think of that moment, I feel like she was passing by on her way to heaven, checking in with me and letting me know she was ready for her new adventure with Jesus.  I cannot imagine that I really didn’t know I wouldn’t see her alive again this side of heaven.  That moment in the truck has turned out to be a huge comfort to me.

    At the time we receive heavenly blessings, we don’t always recognize them for what they are because we don’t know the future.  The passage of time brings experience and knowledge and new perspective.  I’ve worried at times about the danger of inflating Anne’s parting shot with a superimposed meaning.  But all of our memories have superimposed meanings because we know now what we didn’t know then.  And sometimes it is in the remembering that we come to really understand.

The Truth About Virginia

    I remember the yellow sun and cloudless sky.  I was near my car outside the food co-op.  Perhaps Jared (my first husband, father of my children) had just been espousing his rigid religious views.  Perhaps I was there alone to do the shopping.  Maybe I was already a mother, maybe not.

    Virginia, my mother-in-law whom I dearly loved, had journeyed from Colorado to Missouri to visit us.  As always, there had been moments I wished I could erase:  the moments when Jared sternly preached the gospel to her.  Not just any gospel, but the Restoration gospel with its superior Book of Mormon truths and confidence in being the only chosen of God.  Such  preaching from her son always unnerved her.  I could feel her fear, her fluttering self retreating and shutting down, the near tears, the wounding of shame.

    As a dutifully submissive wife with fears from my own past, I kept silent.  Sometimes, later, when we were alone, I tried to point out to Jared that his mom had the simple faith of a child.  Wasn’t that enough? 

    Alone with Virginia, I mostly listened.  She had survived so much, though the horrors she had endured left her irrevocably wounded.  I understood her inability to think of God as Father and saw it as a great grace that she could love and pray to Jesus as Friend.  She really didn’t get the finer points of doctrine.  Anything save the gentlest love frightened her.  Sometimes I chastised myself for my silence when I could have been setting her straight as my husband did.  There must be something wrong with me and my faith to simply want to love her.

    In the co-op parking lot, the truth about Virginia opened up in a second of spiritual insight.  The truth was that God loved her with the perfect tenderness of a father’s love she had never experienced and could not understand.  How He longed for her to shed her fears and shame and how infinitely patient He was with her, knowing well the concrete horrors that kept her imprisoned.  In a moment I knew that God wanted me to continue to love her just as she was.  Only love can reach beyond fear.
   

The Present

    There is no time like the present.

    The present, though, is always imperfect.  How often do we waste the present with our “if only’s”?  If only I felt better . . . if only I had more time . . . if only I had more money . . .

    It’s too easy to “if only” away any good we may do.  It’s easier to wait for the perfect time rather than serve God in the present time.

    I had a particularly hard time adjusting to the present after my sister died.  Here I was, back home after a five-day visit that had turned into a two-month hospital vigil.  It felt so good to sleep in my own bed and to stop living out of a suitcase.  But it took awhile to move from the all-consuming present with Anne before she died to the sad present after she died.  I know:  that’s called grief.  I wanted to stay with her.  But instead I had to learn how to live my life without her.

    And it wasn’t just grief that made living in the present so difficult.  I came back exhausted from one caregiving situation—watching my sister die--right into another caregiving situation—watching my mother live as her mind slowly fades.  I was trying to get my bearings back in the present that was far from perfect but, nonetheless, real. 

The breakthrough moment came after a bad case of bronchitis knocked me down.  My days were reduced to sleeping, doing breathing treatments, and reading when I was awake enough to concentrate.  I wanted to be back in choir.  I wanted to be able to talk without coughing.  I didn’t want to be sick.  Somehow God broke through my misery to let me know the present was now.  I needed to live and love Him in the present, which meant I needed to rest and take care of myself, and I needed to be gracious and patient with Mom no matter how lousy I felt.  No, there was nothing grand to be accomplished in this present.  There were just the boring little details of a circumscribed life.  But I could offer my measly present to God and ask Him to help me through it and be open to His presence in the present.  So I did—very imperfectly, of course.  There was no technicolor moment of spiritual rapture or instantaneous healing or perfect inner peace, just another coughing fit.

Every day, I want to set aside the “if only’s” of my life and embrace the present moment fully. After all, how I live in the present is the only present I can offer to God.
   

Slug History

    I want my vast readership of six faithful blog followers to know that I do not spend all my time thinking about slugs.

    In fact, this morning I wrote out a heartfelt prayer that made no mention of them.  The “Help!” and “Thank You!” in that prayer had nothing to do with the slimy creatures.

    However, in the interest of getting all my slugs in a row, I do wish to share some slug history with you, presented here in no particular order.

1. When he was a teenager, my son-in-law put a slug in his mouth for one minute to win a one-dollar bet.  He said it wasn’t as gross as he had anticipated.

2. There may be a person or two in Austin, Texas who witnessed my friend Sally bursting into hysterical laughter as she spotted a jug of slug bait at a Home Depot last night.  For her outburst I will claim some responsibility.

3. Barb’s fourth grade (or is it fifth grade?) class in the Detroit area enjoys my slug stories—the grosser the better.

4. The most sure-fire way to encounter a slug is on the sole of your shoe while you are looking up at the glorious evergreens and blue sky and puffy white clouds instead of looking down at your feet.

5. I personally witnessed a slug suicide in the sink stopper two summers ago.

6. Singlehandedly, I performed a slug rescue from the bathroom of a house on a busy street in Greensboro, North Carolina in September 2009.

7. My mother is not afraid of slugs, even the tiny one that hid in the cabbage and ended its life in the sink stopper.

8. Carolyn seems to be a little concerned that I count slugs. 

9. I am not obsessed with slugs.

10. Because good lists rarely end with nine items, let me reiterate that I am not obsessed with slugs even though they provide excellent writing fodder.

I Want To Be A Columnist

I spent most the day writing yesterday but none of it suitable (whatever that means) for a blog.  So, in order not to miss a day, which seems to be important to me, here's a little something from November 2008.

    I want to be a columnist when I grow up.  Fame and fortune would be nice, too, but I’d settle for people reading what I write as long as someone pays the bills.

    When I was a child, I wanted to grow up to be just like Mom.  My goals were specific and definable:  go to Oberlin College, have four children (two girls and then two boys), be a teacher, and smoke cigarettes.  It didn’t quite work out that way.  I went to Grinnell College, had two children (one girl and one boy), became a teacher, and never took up smoking.

    In college, when I was searching for what I wanted to do when I grew up, I took a career inventory test.  That was back in the day when such tests had both male and female scores.  (I have no idea how a test can be gendered.)  My top two scores concerned the career counselor a bit:  Catholic priest and male English professor. 

    With my usual completely unrealistic aplomb, I immediately set out in another direction.  I wanted to be a gerontologist, and I majored in German.  That choice did afford me a spring semester in Germany my junior year in college, and I did work with the elderly as a VISTA Volunteer my first year out of college.  But from there my dreams took a detour.  Instead of going back to school to get an M.S. I got married for my MRS.

    Once I was pregnant, my goal was to be a stay-at-home mom, and that worked for about five years.  Then financial reality set in, and I went back to school.  (Somehow my B.A. in German—no teaching degree included—did not market well.)  I wanted to study German again to teach the language, but the university I chose for its relatively traffic-free commute did not offer an M.A. in German.  Thus, using my excellent reasoning ability, I chose the M.A. in English so I could teach at the community college level.  After all, I loved to read and write, and by then I wanted to teach adults, not children.

    So, I got to be an English teacher for nineteen years, an ill-paying but otherwise perfect job for a single parent.  And I enjoyed most years of it—except for the five or six years I wanted to become a Protestant version of a priest.  Female, that is.

    And now, having retired early with no immediate retirement benefits in a world where the stock market swings resemble bungee jumping, I have decided that I want to be a columnist.  From what I read, I could become a niche columnist, which is a nice way to say a columnist who doesn’t fit any of the regular columnist categories.  The problem is that I have a hard time defining my niche.  It has something to do with Whidbey Island and cougars and Alzheimers and fibromyalgia with a little bit of former English teacher, former Mormon, former single parent, former this-and-that-and-everything thrown in for good measure.  (My life experience reads like skewed fiction.)

    I guess there is a lot to be learned from my various career dreams, but what it is I don’t exactly know.  Maybe my desire to be a columnist is proof that I’ve not yet grown up.  Maybe I could become another Erma Bombeck, as my brother suggests.  Just don’t call me Dave (Barry, that is).

Life in the Slow Lane

    When God handed out Type A personalities, he skipped me.  If we use the metaphor of speed for life, I’m no sprinter.  I’m not even a jogger.  I’m a stroller.

    Never in my life have I lived in the fast lane, especially not socially.  My idea of a good time is reading a good book, comfortably reclined.  My idea of an exciting social life is going out for coffee with friends.

    The fast lane escaped me in the work world as well.  I enjoyed my job most of the time, did my best, and left it at that.  There were no academic promotions available where I worked, anyway, so I didn’t have to worry about advancing my career.   

    I used to tell people that being a single parent had all of the responsibilities of parenting and none of the benefits of singleness.  The couples had the advantage of numbers, and the singles had the advantage of free time.  I carved out free time by neglecting household duties.  I never entered the fast track of impeccable housekeeping.  Even though I won the local Betty Crocker Scholarship as a high school senior (for writing an essay), I was no Betty Crocker at home.  I didn’t even know who Martha Stewart was for years.  I slid by on minimum housekeeping efforts, preferring sleep to two a.m. laundry and time with my kids to clean floors.  (Gosh, I should have made them clean the floors.)

  The academic year felt like the Boston Marathon at top speed.  Summers slowed down to a stroll.  (Well, the reality was an enforced sauna, me made motionless by the triple digit heat.)

    I’ve been on a perpetually cool summer vacation for two years now.  I mark my days by meals cooked and laundry done, by the stroll down the driveway to get the mail, by the writing done at my computer, by books read and music practiced.  For fun, I drive into Freeland to look through the thrift store or pick up a few books at the library.  Sometimes I take walks at the tidal flats or Meerkerk Gardens.  Big city life (in Oak Harbor) includes weekly worship at Whidbey Presbyterian and grocery shopping at Saars.

    I like living in the slow lane even though I sometimes get bored.  But then I can always count slugs.

This Should Have Been the First Post

    I lived in Random House for three semesters, but it wasn’t the well-known publishing company.

    A very loose-knit string of acquaintances ended up together in on-campus housing at Grinnell College in Grinnell, Iowa in the fall of 1974.  I don’t even know how the process of pulling a group of people together for the house began.  Nor do I remember who asked me or how I found out about it.  All I know is that a dozen or so sophomores through seniors ended up in a house on North Campus.  We had a group meeting at the beginning, and someone suggested “Random House” for our name.

    Those three semesters in two different houses have set the tone for my life.  Even though I believe in a God of purpose and pattern, it’s more like He weaves  random strands together, eventually, into some meaning rather than stamping out a pattern force-fit upon us. 

    The random strands of my life include the boring, the average, the exciting, and the unusual.  Perhaps my affinity with randomness influences my preference for variegated yarn.  It’s an adventure to see how the colors come together in the knitting.  Chance and choice make for intriguing results.

    I suppose that is why I named this blog “Randomly Speaking.”  I didn’t know what I would be writing about, only that it would weave random strands of my experience into some sort of current commentary.  It’s a good excuse, anyway, for writing randomly.

Sad and Scared

    Last night I was sad and scared and am still sorting it out.

    The sad part is easy:  it was our last official choir practice of the season. 

    The scared part is harder to explain.  I can say, though, that God knew I was scared even without me telling Him.  And not only did He know, but He made sure He addressed that fear several times.

    First was Wednesday’s Upper Room reading from Ephesians 2: 1-10.  Verse 10 was the clincher:  “For we are what he has made us, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand to be our way of life” (NRSV).  It is incredibly comforting to be assured that “we are what he has made us”  and that He has a master plan.

    Then came the reading for June 2 from The Daily Message.  I’m not going to quote Phillippians 1-2 or Psalm 73, but in them was the assurance to keep loving and trusting and letting Him lead (or attempting to, at least).

    You see, writing articles for The Log and my blog scares me.  Okay, that’s not quite right.  The writing is liberating and exciting—I rarely know where that first sentence will lead.  The creative process somehow gets unleashed at the computer keyboard.  It’s the later realization that people may be reading what I write that sometimes strikes terror in my heart.  It’s not just knowing that now they know more about me than I know about them.  It’s also the fear that I am being totally presumptuous that I actually have anything of value to say, which is made worse by the sense that writing is my ministry.  (Well, maybe not the writing about slugs.  There has to be room for my Lussmyer sense of humor.)

    It helped then, to turn to some of Henri Nouwen’s writing in which he explains his sense of writing as vocation.  His words resound with me.  They remind me I am not alone.  Granted, it is a presumption to even put myself in the same sentence as Nouwen, but it is a comfort to share a sacred sense of God’s particular call to write.

    Now that I’ve sorted out last night’s feelings, I am more aware and still scared.  But I am posting this anyway.  After all, you don’t have to read it unless you want to.
   

Pain

Is there a reason to blog about pain?  Does acknowledging it make it better or worse?  Or does sharing simply relieve the isolation that pain brings?

The weather system moving in bodes ill for my body.  The knuckle ache has already fanned out to include my arms and shoulders, my hips and knees, my ankles and toes.   A profound fatigues settles like fog on my brain.  My skin is increasingly sensitive to touch.  It really hurt when I accidentally bumped my hand earlier while laboring to unscrew a lid.

At least I know that this familiar pain has not yet lasted forever.  Give me a couple hours or a couple days and it will fade out.  Then I will once again gradually take for granted the respite from pain and fatigue until the next time it creeps up on me.

But I refuse to take for granted the blessings I have. 

Because I don’t have to work a “real” job, I have the time and energy to do the things I love.  I can spend my energy as I wish.  I can pace my activities to avoid so many crashes.  Sometimes I get the pace so perfect that I can forget the limitations of fibromyalgia.  In fact, that is most of the time now. 

On days like these, I do wish I could oil my joints like the Tin Man or have my joints and muscles as loose as the Scarecrow.  I think of Whidbey Island as my technicolor land of Oz, but there will be no skipping down the yellow brick road tonight.  I feel more like lying down in the poppies and taking a nice long nap.

Knuckles

    I’ve had a pretty strenuous week, and my knuckles bore the brunt of it.

    How can Tuesday’s twenty-hour travel day make one knuckle-weary?  It was pulling the carry-on bag and using the smart phone as I whiled away the airport hours. 

    Wednesday’s massage did everything for my tight back and shoulder muscles but not much for my knuckles.  Choir practice soothed away the post-massage ache.

    Practicing with the senior citizen dance band on Thursday didn’t seem to affect my knuckles adversely, but playing the two-plus hour dance the next night put a strain on them.

    Saturday was spent in recuperation, and participating in both services Sunday was a delight.  However, I snagged a knuckle on the shopping cart later.

    Other knuckle culprits of the week were cutting up two quarts of strawberries, practicing my flutes, indulging in a couple hours of computer solitaire, and writing, writing, writing at my computer keyboard.

    So I’m left with aching knuckles and a bit of fluid retention inbetween each knob.

    And you’re left wondering why you’ve just spent a few minutes reading about my knuckles.  And I’m wondering what leads me to knuckle down and write about my knuckles in the first place.
 
    This is the point where I’m supposed to tie everything together in a grand knuckle finale to make you chuckle.  However, I need to knuckle under to my inner taskmaster and take care of a few things around the house.