How I Got Here

            I couldn’t afford to retire.  But I did anyway.

            Fiscal common sense has never been my strong suit.  If it was, I would never have gone to an expensive private college and spent a semester in Germany.  Both were beyond my budget.  Both turned out to be incredibly enriching experiences that got paid for after all.

            If I’d had some fiscal sense, I would have gone into some kind of lucrative business career instead of education.  But then I would have missed the joys and agonies peculiar to community college teaching.

            I spent my teacher’s life barely getting by:  paying the bills, buying the food, raising my children.  The year the faculty received a five percent raise, I decided I should learn about IRAs now that I was going to have little cushion each month.  That was when our health insurance premiums went up and our prescription drug coverage went down.  Good-bye cushion, good-bye IRA dreams.  At an in-service one fall, there was a designated time for staff and faculty to talk about their collecting hobbies.  I told the group that I had never been a collector—in fact, I hadn’t even managed to collect child support.

            If I had possessed fiscal sense, I would not have quit my job the spring before the economy crashed (or recessed, depending on your point of view).  I wouldn’t have moved from Kansas to Washington, my only savings the insurance settlement for the car my husband had totaled.  (Thank goodness, no one was hurt.) 

            But look at all I would have missed and look at how God has provided for me.  (I try to be responsible, I really do, and I’m not advocating fiscal irresponsibility.)

            My money ran out early in 2009.  My brother started paying my bills.  From the beginning it was clear that full-time work would be impossible due to my responsibilities at home with Mom.  I kept applying for part-time library positions and had some great interviews but never landed a job.  But lack of money has never kept me from my children, so I flew out to Tulsa on May 22, the day my grandson Benjamin was born, and stayed for five weeks to help out.  Then I visited my son, who had, interestingly enough, moved from Taylor, Indiana to Colorado Springs on May 22.  I got back to Whidbey Island on July 2.  On July 29, I found myself on a plane again, this time headed to North Carolina where my sister Anne was dying from cancer.  Once I got there, I couldn’t make myself leave, so I stayed.  (John continued to pay my bills and care for Mom in my absence.)  Anne died October 3.  On October 7, with the blessings of both my brothers, I was flying to Tulsa, hoping that spending time with my five-month-old grandson would be a comfort to my grieving heart.  It was.  I finally came back to the island a couple weeks later.

            And then my financial woes disappeared, though I would have much preferred my sister’s life to her money.  As her sole beneficiary, I suddenly had the means to pay off all my debts and to give and to save.  I also inherited her pension plan and, then, once I turned 55, my teacher’s state pension kicked in as well. 

Every day I’m astounded by my blessings.  I continue helping my mother and brother.  I pay my own way now.  I can afford flute lessons.  I have the means to visit that darling grandson of mine on a regular basis.  I have the time to devote to church ministries, writing, and music.            

In short, God is how I got here.  I’m quite sure that Anne approves.

           

The Weekend

            She stops her golf cart twice on her way to John’s basement door. The first stop involves a very brief foray into the woods.  The second time she gets out of her cart and stands close by the fence, hands clasped behind her back, peering at the cougars.  It’s almost as if she hasn’t seen them before.    

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            I answer her question almost before she has spoken it.  It’s only about the fifth time, after all:  “John’s going to take you to Freeland to do a few errands.”

            “Good!” she answers, “I just feel like I HAVE to go somewhere.”

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            Her acute hearing seems to be disappearing.  Or maybe it’s just her comprehension.

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            She cries towards the end of The King’s Speech and talks about her childhood memories of that era.  She says that the movie connected with her.  During the showing, I hear stray comments from her like “good old 1935” and “ah yes!  Elizabeth and Margaret.”  Afterwards, she rehashes her movie comments in a circuitous loop, but by the time we have finished with dinner and gotten home, the experience has faded.

            And at bedtime she asks, “What day was it?” (Sunday) and “Did I have my shower?” (Yes, this morning.) 

           

Excuse Me

            Excuse me, but how did I get to be 55?

            It’s sobering when I realize that my “new” flute is forty years old.  It’s perhaps a little more sobering when I note that I’ve been playing flute for forty-five years.

            Weren’t the 1990s just a short time ago? 

            I remember the very first time I surfed the Web—there was a single computer in the college library basement that had an Internet connection, so one slow afternoon at work I tried it out.  (The faculty was being encouraged to keep up with technology, after all.)  I typed in various search terms and spent an hour or so following whatever caught my interest—mostly German pages to see how much German I remembered.  That was back when I didn’t even have a computer in my office.

            I can take another leap backward in time to the 1970s.  Attending a prestigious liberal arts college in the Midwest, I had my moments of snobbery.  One was looking down my nose at the newfangled computer course offerings.  “Who,” I thought, “would bother with those machines?  They aren’t that important.  I mean, who would ever have occasion to use one?”  So I continued with my eclectic assortment of humanities courses, dutifully typing my research papers on my manual Olivetti typewriter.

            I seem to remember being young in the 1980s, entering marriage and motherhood with the firm conviction that I was going to get everything right, unlike all the previous generations of humankind.  Most of my friends were even younger than I and similarly enlightened, though I did have one friend who was impossibly old:  over forty, I think!

            And even Y2K is more than a decade gone.  Our church had a New Year’s Eve party, and when the lights went out at the stroke of midnight, there was a millisecond of fear . . . until we realized one of the teens had hit the switch.  Turns out I didn’t need that back-up $50 I had hidden in my house in case the banks closed.

            Now, with the benefit of fifty-five and a half years of life experience behind me, I have gained a certain amount of wisdom.  I no longer believe in life without computers.  I’ve forgotten more German than I remember.  I have come to grips with the fact that someday my children will be over forty.   And once in awhile, sometimes, on a good day, I even get a thing or two right.  But I’m still surprised to see this older version of myself staring back from the mirror. 

           

Those Crazy Cytokines

            When they heard that the sheriff was taking a vacation, what kept them in line was not knowing exactly when the patrol would be resumed.

            But a little freedom soon went to their heads.  Normally, cytokines are necessary messenger-bearers.  The good ones do their jobs and deliver important news in a timely fashion.  The renegades are the problem.

            Perhaps through the force of long-imposed rules issuing from the sheriff, the cytokines worked mostly by the book at first.  The news that the sheriff was extending his holiday, though, eventually eroded their self-control.  Some of them started to run rather than walk.  Others thought it amusing to make deliveries at their own whim.  There were even a few who ran around crazily, bumping into the responsible ones and sending them careering off in unintended directions.

            What they didn’t know eventually cut them short and restored order:  even though the sheriff was gone, command headquarters was closely monitoring the situation.  When she saw their renegade activity increasing, she acted quickly and called the sheriff.  He made his appearance at high noon, and by four p.m. the worst offenders were rounded up and set aright.

            Command headquarters then made a strategic error.  Believing all was in control, she let the sheriff take the next day off.  Those crazy cytokines wasted no time in resuming their misbehavior.  Little do they know that another showdown is scheduled today at noon and, in fact, will be repeated every single day at noon from this day forward.  Order shall be restored.

           

*Now, in case you do not realize that you have just read an allegory, let me reveal the true identity of the cast of characters:  cytokines = cytokines (molecular messengers that regulate inflammatory response--which can be translated here as pain control), sheriff = Celebrex, command headquarters = Janis.

           

Yesterday She Sat

Yesterday she sat

And the day before that.

Today she is busy

Throwing me in a tizzy.

            I won’t need a walk to get my walking in today.  After most of the week not feeling well, Mom is back on track today.  It’s just that the track has changed somewhat.  Because I am less sure than ever what she may or may not do, I’m following in her footsteps:  tracking her, I guess you would say.  This morning that has involved two trips over to John’s house just to see what was and wasn’t done. 

            Actually, she has done very well so far.  She picked up the paper trash that the dogs scattered in the basement last night and stacked the cat dishes in the sink to be washed.  She has a basin of coffee grounds and vegetable leavings in John’s living room to take out to the compost pile and a basket of plastic bottles to go out to the trash can.  I went ahead and took the paper trash out of that basket and delivered it to the basement.  And she got her golf cart out of the shop for the first time this week.  It helps that the snow has melted.

            But, still, I am feeling a bit stressed.  It’s hard to stave away the worries and guilt I feel when I have things to do away from the house, such as the small group leaders’ meeting at church this afternoon and flute choir tonight.  Yet it is precisely those “away times” that keep me functional during the longer hours at home.  Care giving is a balancing act between her needs and my needs.