Hiatus

Finding Maude is officially going on hiatus.  It may be for quite a while.  But I'll let you all know when I'm back.

In the meantime, thanks for reading for so long (and for some of you, so faithfully), and I hope you'll come back when I do.

xRachx

Goodbyes

My grandfather passed away yesterday at the age of 75.  He’d been battling with his health for years, first with his heart and, more recently, his kidneys.  The last time I saw him, I asked him how he was feeling, and he put his arm around me and said, “Much better now that my little Polish girl has come to see me.  Jak sie masz?”  He liked that I was in Poland.  I’m not sure he wouldn’t have liked it better if I’d settled down up the street from him and had some children to bring by for visits every day, but he seemed to take a certain pride in scouring his memory for off-color jokes in Polish that he could relate to me, always hoping I would understand, no matter how many times I told him my Polish was quite weak. 

My grandfather was funny.  He sometimes liked to hide his humor in comments that sounded like grumpiness or annoyance, but then he’d give you a little wink so you knew he was kidding.  Often these particular jokes were directed at my grandmother.  After 57 years of marriage, he liked to pretend that he had to nag her constantly to get her to do anything for him, and then swat playfully at her as she said, “Oh, Ernie!” and then bustled off to find whatever he’d been hinting around for.  It was always clear he was a softie, though, because of the way he doted on the children around him.  Now, as I understand it, he could sometimes be a strict father, but as a grandfather, it was always about me getting what I wanted.  Somewhere, in a dusty box of photos at my parents house, there is a picture of my grandfather sitting on the floor while I walk and climb all over him as if he was a jungle gym.  It’s one of my favorite memories, climbing around and jumping off of chairs to be caught by my grandfather.  It’s something I do now, with my niece.

This summer has been a constant surprise. And several of the surprises have been nasty ones rather than nice ones. At times it seemed that just when I was starting to cheer up again, something else would happen to unravel everything I’d been planning.  And it’s a bit tempting to give in to that train of thought right now.  But I can look at it another way: one of the outcomes of this strange summer was an unexpected opportunity to spend a few weeks in the United States and visit my friends and family recently.  If all had gone according to the plan, I would be in Guatemala right now and would not have had these last few opportunities to sit with my grandpa and listen to his jokes, to hug him and have him say the two words he always  said, without fail, whenever we said goodbye: “Come again.”  Even if he had come to visit me, he would say this, but with a little chuckle.   However much I wish I could be there now, with my family, to say my proper goodbyes, I’m grateful that I got to say some kind of goodbye.  That the last time I saw him was only a week and a half ago, instead of nearly a year.

What's in a Dumpling?

It was a damp, windy afternoon in my little corner of Poland today.  As I waited for the train to take me from my new students’ office in Szczecin Dąbie back across the river, I felt like Autumn had arrived…a bit too abruptly.  But it is my favorite season (when I’m dressed appropriately for it), so I put my mind to thinking about all the nice things I associate with Autumn.  And that’s when I had a truly inspired idea.  I decided to try to make my mother’s homemade chicken dumpling soup.  I didn’t have a recipe, and with the time difference, I couldn’t really call and ask for one.  But the soup itself is not that complicated – it’s the dumplings that take some practice - so I figured the worst case scenario would leave me with a lot of chicken stock to use in another recipe. 

So off I went to the corner veggie stand and the shop just down the road for supplies.  I couldn’t find everything I thought I needed, so I had to make one or two substitutions. I chopped everything up, making some educated guesses with regard to quantities, and threw it all in a big pot.  And, much to my surprise and delight, before very long, my apartment filled up with one of my favorite aromas from my childhood – it was like being in my parents’ house in late November, and it brought back this incredible sense of warmth, ease and comfort. 

After an hour or so, I mixed together my best guess at what the dumplings might be made of and spooned the batter into the stock, fingers crossed the whole time.  And guess what?  I did it!  The dumplings were perfect, and the soup was awfully close to Mom’s.  I think the substitutions I had to make here in Poland made up the majority of the difference.  As long as food-poisoning doesn’t begin to set in before breakfast, I’m going to consider my efforts a roaring success!

check out those dumplings...

OK, excuse all the detail about cooking.  I really don’t flatter myself that most of my poor readers really give a damn what I made for dinner, but the point isn’t the food itself (though if you’re keeping score, I’m officially ticking off dish number three from item 74 on my list).  It never is with me, is it?  What was so great about this is what it stands for.  The last few years of my life have been full of upheaval.  Some truly amazing things have happened, and so have a few awful things.  I’ve felt lost more often than I care to admit.  And when I came to Poland a year ago, I kind of drew a line in the sand between my “old” life and my “new” life.  In some ways, that has been very good for me.  Letting go of hang-ups, searching for ways to define my life through more fulfilling endeavors, and dropping some very bad habits.  But it also cut me off from some things that have made me happy over the years.  And the more I pushed back against my past, the more disconnected I felt from any success or happiness I’ve felt in the present, because it wasn’t really me who was doing all of these things…it was this shiny new girl who lived someplace different and had an exotic new life.  Not to mention that it’s a lot of unnecessary pressure.  All that time, being worried that one wrong choice was going to send me into a tailspin that would put me “right back where I started,” as if that was even possible.

Well, going back to Wisconsin for a few weeks reminded me of something very important: you can’t change where you come from.  And you shouldn’t attempt to.  Trying to make a home and a life for yourself as an adult is scary, whether you do it 5 miles away from where you grew up, or 5000.  But there is a surprising amount of comfort to be found in being reminded of exactly who you are and just how far you’ve come already.  It puts things into perspective and makes “the future” seem so much more manageable. It’s just a series of small steps you take, steps that add to who you already were, rather than transforming you completely.  And the small pleasures will always be there.  They come from the flavors and smells of day-to-day life, and in tiny moments of recognition, like when you come back from vacation and see someone who was so recently a new friend, and the smile on their face looks like home.  And from the (probably excessive) pride you feel as a result of accomplishing something as simple as recreating the warm feeling of your old home however far away you happen to be now.  Even if all you really did was make some soup.

Work in Progress

At times like this, when I’m not sure exactly what I want or where I’m headed, I find it’s best for me not to force it.  To wait it out, and, while I’m waiting, to go back to the basics.  Try to sort out “who I am,” or, in other words, what my most basic values are now.  This is one of the many reasons "the List" has been so important in my life.  In addition to being a tangible reminder of the things that are important to me, it is, when all else fails, a damn good distraction.  At any given time, I can put myself to work chipping away at one (or more) of the items.  And, if I’m paying attention, each attempt, big or small, successful or unsuccessful, teaches me something new.  It’s kind of like finding a puzzle piece that fits somewhere on the picture you’re trying to make.  It’s not always the piece you were looking for, but every bit helps.

  

The more eagle-eyed among you may have noticed that I put my list on the sidebar of this blog a few weeks ago.  I felt a little weird about it, because some of those items are a bit personal, but I figure you can’t expect to get what you want in life if you won’t even admit what that is. So there it is.  And hey, if you think you can help, let me know.   Anyway, right now I’m working on items 16, 55, and 74.

Number 55 isn’t easy, but it’s simple.  It doesn’t require much more of me than dedication and tolerance to pain.  Like most of life.  There’s only one way to accomplish it, and that is to go straight into it.  At least once every other day, I try to do as many push-ups as I can, and I try to do more than I did last time.  My progress? The number I can do with my knees on the ground has been going up relatively quickly, so I think any day now I’ll be able to do more than ½ of a “real” push-up.  Any day now.  And from there, 10 can’t be so far off.

Item 74 has been trickier than I thought it would be.  But only because I let it be.  I can bake, but I want to learn to cook. Specifically, I want to be able to cook at least 10 dishes well. I’ve already got enchiladas, and I more or less know my way around a lasagna, but with 8 dishes to go, I need some items in my repertoire that aren’t casseroles.  That said, I’ve concluded that I’m not much for complicated recipes and exotic ingredients.  I went through a phase where I wanted to make really impressive food, and it generally led to culinary disasters.  I thought I must be hopeless, so I decided to take advantage of the close proximity to my mother, grandmother and sister by getting recipes from them and then following them to the letter.  Well, guess what I’ve learned? It’s not about the recipes, exactly: they all make exceedingly delicious meals by, for the most part, keeping it simple.  They don’t need 30 types of seasoning when one or two will do just fine.  They don’t have to hunt for ingredients at special supermarkets.  I’m going to follow their lead, and see what happens.  Sometimes you’ve got to get out of your own way and stop complicating everything with grandiose plans.  That’s true of food, and it’s true of just about everything else.

Finally, my favorite: number 16.  I started playing the piano when I was 6 or 7 years old, when my parents bought me a Casio keyboard, which I’m pretty sure they could barely afford, and enrolled me in lessons at my school.  I spent long, agonizing, enchanted evenings poking at the keys in an effort to make “Kumbaya” come out.  And eventually, I did.  It felt like a miracle.  By the time I was about 12, I was agonizing over Bach and Beethoven.  But I decided that playing piano wasn’t as cool as hanging out with my friends.  So I quit.  I didn’t regret it right away, but for about 10 years now, I’ve wanted to find my way back.  The problem is that whenever I start again, I get discouraged.  I’m rusty now, my fingers aren’t as nimble as they used to be, and even reading music requires a lot more thought than I feel like it ought to.  And when I stumble over a simple song, I lose heart. 

At the time I quit, I had just begun learning Beethoven’s Fur Elise.  Now I want to finish.  Of course, what I really want is to start.  Start playing again, playing everything under the sun, not just that song.  But first I want to make it back to where I left off: Fur Elise.  I could’ve learned it relatively quickly fifteen years ago.  But now I’m going to have to work my way up to it.  I can play the first two sections.  I still haven’t managed to make my fingers move quickly enough for the third.  But when I sit down at my mom’s piano, I feel my world shrinking down to the notes, to my fingers, to the way the music feels, and I remember this piece of myself, a piece I let go when I first started to care what it meant to be “cool.”  A piece I’ve approached dozens of times since then, but walked away from each time because I wasn’t sure if I had what it took to do it anymore.  I’ve been playing every day here.  And it’s such a small thing, but it makes me deep-down happy.  One more little thing that makes me happy to add to my life, to the other little things.  One more puzzle piece in place.  When I get back to Poland, I’m going to find a practice space and keep working on it. 

Amateur Cartography

But I am not an explorer.  I haven't a single explorer on my planet.  It is not the geographer who goes out to count the towns, the rivers, the mountains, the seas, the oceans, and the deserts.

–Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

This won’t come as a surprise if you've been paying attention, but I haven’t been feeling very positive about life lately.  I checked with a friend and the notion was seconded.  There has apparently been an observable decline in my optimism and cheerfulness in the past several months.  I could get into how it happened and what’s to blame for all of it, and I’d probably come up with some good answers, but knowing those things isn’t particularly helpful in this situation.  The questions I should really be asking are ‘what have I been doing that I need to stop doing?’ and ‘what things can I do that I haven’t been doing enough of?’

I’ve been going over and over this in my head for weeks, and I think there are probably a fair number of minor adjustments that could be made, but it hit me a few minutes ago that the major thing I’ve been doing in the last few months that I wasn’t doing before is that I’ve been thinking too far ahead, worrying about problems that haven’t arisen yet, and that may never arise.  Yes, it’s good to plan for the future, but when I had a wake-up call about how short life can be and I quit being a lawyer and decided to make some major changes, I also resolved not to do that anymore.  Not to get my head so tangled up in every possible thing that could go wrong years down the line that I never made any real decisions.  Not to put off my happiness until conditions were “favorable,” i.e., my life was exactly the way I’d envisioned it.  And I did quite well for a while.  But for one reason and another, I’ve somehow wandered back to the point where I am today, too concerned about where I’m going, not nearly concerned enough about where I am. 

It stops now.  I’m going back to being more in the present.  It’s true that I’ve realized this year that I may have gone too far with my “no tomorrow” theory, and that I can’t just drift along forever hoping I’ll stumble into a satisfying life.  This means that, yes, I still have some very real concerns about my present and about my future, and I need to sort those out.  But I’m going to come at them one at a time, as they relate to the life I’m living now, and not try to guess at every conceivable consequence of each action and try to figure out how to deal with those, too.  The best choices I’ve ever made have been the result of other actions I took.  They have not come from a process of bullying my brain into deciding something.  And the happiest times of my life have been those when I had goals I was aiming for, but not overly-specific road maps that I felt pressured to follow.  Because there are always surprises, always unforeseen obstacles or delays.  And the more I had my heart set on every detail going a certain way, the worse it felt when the world had other ideas for me.  So I’m going to have to let go of a few things that I’ve been trying too hard to control.  If I need to grip it so tightly, maybe it's not something I'm meant to have.  And who knows?  Perhaps I'll be pleasantly surprised by what keeps floating around me once I've let go.  As my friend Elaine’s pappy says, “What’s for you won’t go past you!”*

Also, I’m going back to the list.  Look forward to a series of entries detailing how I’ve attempted (and succeeded at) crossing items off the epic list of things I want to do before I die.  Please hold me accountable.  If these entries don’t start appearing soon, do me a favor and ask me about the items.  And if I ask you for help with checking one off, do both of us a favor, and say yes.  I bet you won’t regret it.

*Thanks again for that gem, Elaine.

Home is where...um...er...

So, it’s been a while.  But there are reasons.  I really don’t like feeling like I use this blog as a platform to complain.  But it’s the middle of July now, and in the interest of complete honesty, I’m just gonna say it.  This summer has not been the easiest of my life so far.  Luckily, there have been some high points scattered amongst the lows, or I might have given up and crawled straight into bed for at least a month.  My summer plans for Guatemala all unraveled at the last minute, while I was at an airport just outside of London.  That was a low.  But I was taken in and cared for and entertained by Leah and Pete’s warm and wonderful English family.  That was a high, and I felt really blessed to have people who cared for me around at just the right moment.  Then I came back to Poland and found a lot of empty days stretching before me with no work waiting here for me to do.  Low.  But I had a few people here to help me fill my spare time and to help me scrounge up a lesson or two, and my boss wrote me a recommendation so I could try to get summer camp work, and it seemed like it might be manageable after all.  Maybe not a high, per se, but at least a little bump in the right direction.

But this week has not been good.  I got some bad news from my mother, and it wasn’t remotely feasible for me to fly back to be with my family.  And it’s pretty lonely here right now.  I don’t mean to sound ungrateful for the friends I have here, but sometimes when things are bad, what you really need around you are the people that you know you can call in the middle of the night if you have to, even if it’s just to talk.  The ones who know you well enough to just turn up, even though you didn’t ask.  The ones who you can really cry in front of – you know the ones…you’re so upset that your face is all red and puffy and you’ve got snot coming out of your nose, and they act like they don’t even notice.  Those people, for me, are pretty far away.  Skype helps, but there’s still a seven hour time difference to contend with, and sometimes there’s a delay, or your internet stops working for no reason, or whatever. 

And this has all got me thinking about home.  What is ‘home’?  Because I don’t really know if I have one anymore.  I had a long talk with my best friend tonight.  She said that, for her, it’s all about deciding who you want to spend your life with.  Then anyplace is home.  No matter where you live, there are going to be shitty things about it, but if you’re around the right people, then you’ll always be home.  I’m inclined to agree, but that doesn’t wrap it all up as neatly as you’d think.  My family and most of my dearest friends are in the United States.  But the idea of moving back there fills me with dread.  I want to live someplace where at least I can go to the doctor if something’s wrong with me.  I want to live someplace where I’m not constantly being told I have to have a lucrative job, or a mortgage, to feel successful.  I want to live someplace where my kids won’t be made fun of for being know-it-alls if they should happen to like to read or watch documentaries about how the human body works or where our food comes from.  I want to live someplace where gun violence is virtually irrelevant, because nobody has guns.  And I don’t meet a lot of people there who feel as strongly as I do about those things.  And they don’t have to.  But it’s hard to feel you belong someplace where your core values are so different from everyone around you.  It’s hard to imagine finding a partner and making a good life there. 

But.  There is something very fragile about life as an expat.  Especially here.  When I had no work in Wisconsin, I got a job waiting tables for extra cash.  That’s illegal for me here, even if I spoke enough Polish to do the job.  My grasp on the language is tenuous at best, so though I can afford to visit the doctors, they’re intimidating.   And that also makes it hard to make friends with anyone but the other English teachers, who come and go on 9-month contracts.  So (and this is the important point) there is a considerable scarcity of the kind of friends I described above.  And this is partly my own fault.  I could’ve made more of an effort this year.  But I worked a lot, and I spent a lot of time with people who’ve now either moved away or who have their own lives here, based on something other than just the job they happened to have (their partners, families, school, etc.).  I never planted myself that fully in this community.  And if I’m honest, I probably never will, because Szczecin is not really the place I envision myself settling in and growing old. 

So, what do you do?  It’s tempting to believe that you can just keep moving around until you find the right thing, but I’ve seen people who’ve done that and found themselves just as aimless at 35 as they were at 20.  There’s also some comfort in the idea that if you just commit to some random choice you’ve made, you’ll make it all come together eventually.  But as I learned from law school, if you force yourself to commit to something that is just not right for you, you can end up several years older, deeply in debt, and even more confused than when you started out.  Maybe it’s blind alchemy.  Make the best choices you can from where you are,  commit yourself to them as completely as you can, hope everything doesn’t fall apart, make subtle adjustments when it does, repeat, repeat, repeat.  Nothing is perfect, but slowly it takes shape. 

I hope so, anyway, cause that’s the best plan I’ve got right now.

Sorry for whining.  I’m sure it will all be better tomorrow.  Or the next day.

Put me in my place

Increasingly, I’ve been feeling like my values are way out of step with those of the societies I’ve been living in.  I left the United States partly because I love traveling, partly because I wanted to try a job that felt more like helping someone (I couldn’t face up to one more second as a lawyer) but also because I felt like everything was for sale - even the health and happiness of small children has a price tag on it.  Especially that, because people will pay anything for it.  In Poland, it’s not quite there, but after their history with dictators, it feels like they’ve swung around and begun worshipping anything with the word ‘free’ in it: free market, free trade, free-for-all…Because America once looked like the promised land when they were younger, they’re determined to become that.   I used to look to the government for change, used to identify with liberals the world over.  Now I’m starting to feel that most world leaders are the same, wherever you go.  And I swear to God, as strange as this sounds, this has not made me a pessimist.  I still believe in people.  I just don’t believe in the systems.  The governments are corporations now, and you know how I’ve always felt about those, right?  

No, I’m not saying we’re irretrievably lost.  I’m wondering where the path is.  Where do you go when you feel like living your day-to-day life is a series of tiny contributions to something that you feel is genuinely appalling?  When all of those tiny contributions start to pile up and become mountains?  Lately I’ve been mentally stretching the threads from one puzzle piece to another (like a paranoid in the movies), and  I can see the connection between my dirt-cheap pair of jeans and the Haitian worker who’s trying to feed his children on 31 cents a day.  Between my bottle of water and the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.  Between my savings account and the commodities speculators who are starving families to death in Guatemala and elsewhere.  And I don’t like it.  I know I’m not actively supportive of these heartless billionaires, but I am supporting them just by living where I do, and having the things I have.  And there doesn’t feel like much of a way to live in the modern world without lending your support to them.

So my friend and I were debating this.  It seems like you have some choices, but there’s always a catch.  Part of me would like to wander off to the remote countryside, go back to nature, to the way life was a long time ago, and have a little farm.  Not much, just some fruits and vegetables, chickens, maybe a goat.  Enough to live on, without all the extra stuff.  Use environmentally-sound practices, and not hurt anybody.  Maybe help some people, in small ways – my neighbors, etc.  But then someone can point the finger and tell me I’m running away.  Burying my head in  the sand.  But if I stay put and try to fight it, I’m living in a place where most of the things I’ll use/come into contact with every day are part of the problem.  Where me and my privileged family are part of the problem.  Also, it’s beyond frustrating to always be fighting.  It’s one of the reasons I quit the law.  I wanted a life, not a constant battle.  And this fight is enormous.  It seems impossible sometimes.  Do I just try to find a country whose values are at least a bit closer to mine, raise some children there, and accept that it’s good enough?  Move to the “third-world” and live a life of service?  Work some kind of middle ground between escaping it completely and staying for the fight?  Is there one? 

I know I have some friends who feel the way I do.  What do you do?  How do you square your life with your beliefs?  What feels right to you?  Because for me, I’m really not sure anymore.  Most likely, if I keep up the way I am, I’ll stumble about for a bit longer and then “end up” wherever I am when I decide to get married, have kids.  And then make the best of it for those children.  Maybe that’s ok.  Maybe it’s even what most people do, and I’ll make peace with it when/if it happens.  From here, though, it feels like the kind of thing that should be a choice, not just a hole you fell into when you weren’t looking.

[A few notes: This entry was hard to write.  In more than one way.  First, it’s a hard topic to even wrap my head around some days, so I’m sorry if it didn’t make a lot of sense.  Also, I know some people might feel that this is somehow a judgment about their lives.  (So let me get this out there: it’s honestly not.  I know that my values and desires are different from other people’s.  This is a reaction to thoughts I have about living my life in accordance with my personal value system.)  Finally, it’s hard to write because I feel that this blog can be a bit heavy sometimes, and as a matter of vanity, I want people to think of me as cheerful and pleasant, not preachy and bleak. But I write when I need to untie knots for myself, so I guess it’s bound to be messy.  Hope you don’t mind too much.]

Aceptando Ayuda, With Love...

So it’s been a while without an update.  And I’ve been pretty bad at writing emails, too.  Sorry about that.  I have an excuse!  And a good one, too.  I’m getting ready to spend three months in a Guatemalan jungle with 250 children. 

It’s funny, because it sounds like a joke, but it’s not.

Getting myself prepared for my summer plans has actually turned up quite a few more challenges than I thought it would.  But now that I think about it, it’s kind of a miracle there haven’t been even more.   I want you to imagine something: you are going to the jungle for three months.  You need to buy certain supplies that are not commonly needed in every part of the world (super-strength insect repellent, for example).  You need injections and malaria pills, and you need to decide what to bring to a place where you will have no electricity, no hot water, millions of animals and critters, and no department store just up the road.  Got it in your head?  Now do it while living in an Eastern European country where you have the language skills of the average 2-year-old, at best.  Not that I’m complaining.  It’s actually been a bit of an adventure already.  And it’s given me the chance to let other people help me, and therefore made me appreciate some of the people in my life even more.

There have been several friends who have offered me help with their encouraging words, assistance with Spanish, priceless advice, phone calls to friends to get information, etc.  I hope you know who you are, and that I’ve thanked you enough.  Some of you have quite simply been life rafts on days when I’ve been scared and felt lost. 

There is, however, one person I simply can’t thank enough, so I want to mention her by name.  Natalia, who works at Bell as one of the administrators, is, to use a Spanish expression I just learned, un alma de Dios.  (This is a person who is incredibly kind and for whom there can be no harsh words.)  When I told her what I was doing, she went straight to her computer and her telephone and started asking everyone she could think of what kinds of vaccines I needed and where I could go to get them.  She got the people at medicus to order the rabies vaccine specially for me, and when my doctor was lecturing me for not knowing exactly how many malaria pills I would need, Natalia spoke to her on the phone and made it better.  When I overpaid at the doctor,  she took care of everything again.  I’m pretty sure I would’ve quit halfway through the medical process if I hadn’t had her to help me.  Now I’m one rabies shot away from being vaccinated, and just waiting on a package from England with my malaria pills in it.

With just over three and a half weeks to go before the “real” adventure begins, I’m sure I’ll be pretty busy right up until the moment I get on the plane.  I’m sure I’ll be some combination of scared, excited, stressed, and humbled.  And I’m sure I’ll keep being touched by what wonderful people I know (and in fact, some I don’t know – I’ve been helped by total strangers).  I wrote about responsibility a while ago.  About taking responsibility for both the good and bad that I’ve created in my own life.  And it feels amazing to be able take responsibility for having such people in my life, but I think I get to share the credit with them for a lot of the magical turns my life has taken, because I couldn’t have made any of them alone.  And the more I think about it, I wouldn’t have wanted to.  It feels better to share the experience with people who care about you.

Gracias, mis seres queridos.

Sorry, I guess I'm feeling quite sentimental today.

Todo está en su cabeza

Sometimes  I get the sneaking suspicion that the things I write about in this blog – especially the ones that seem like great revelations to me – are not remotely new or interesting ideas, but are rather painfully and embarrassingly obvious.  In fact, this suspicion is strong enough and appears frequently enough to make me consider that maybe it’s a waste of time to write it - or at the very least that I should change the name to something more apt, like “A Complete Idiot’s Painfully Clichéd Guide to Life…”  I have, after all, proven myself to be capable of trying to glean wisdom from the most obvious of sources, and from my most moronic decisions.  Some of which, I might add, I seem to make again and again without ever learning any better, as I have ostensibly been endowed with the memory span of a hamster (apparently, fish have much longer memory spans than is commonly believed, by the way.  Thank you, Stephen Fry).  So, why don’t I do it?  First of all, fear of a copyright suit from Penguin Books.   And second, I guess because I’m trying to forgive my foolishness.  Isn’t this what we all do?  Stumble from one thing to the next constantly discovering, forgetting, and re-discovering the essential?  Sometimes we need the obvious to hit us over the head with the force of a heavy wooden baseball bat.  Many times.  So I keep writing, just like I keep learning.

This weekend, through various conversations, encounters, coincidences, and the secret magic of samba drums, the oh-so-obvious lesson seems to be one of attitude and perspective.  When everyone you know is going through similar struggles, and some remain cheerful while others are miserable, you can see how attitude makes a huge difference.  When positivity makes you try something different for a change, and it works to make you feel better - or when it makes you appreciate something nice instead of wondering when it’s going to start to go bad - you see it.  When 3 lines of drummers stand shoulder to shoulder making the same brilliant music, you can see how the lively, laughing, goony-looking man becomes so much more appealing and eye-catching than the beautiful but dour woman next to him.  And how the middle-aged mom who’s dancing and laughing looks funny, but much happier than the cool young couple next to her who are nodding their heads drowsily.  It’s very easy to fall prey to the idea that life is about your circumstances.  And a little bit of it is.  But mostly it’s about the joy, isn’t it?  If there is absolutely none to be found anywhere, then maybe your circumstances are making your life.  But for most of us, we can choose to mine out the enthusiasm and enchantment from what we’re already doing, in the place we already are, and then continue to follow it to wherever else it may lead us. 

I’m going to try harder to remember that this time around.  Like usual. ;-)

Something I've been thinking about for a long time: this city looks much prettier
 if you look up.
These are the same buildings, at street level, and above.

Mother's Day

A mother is a person who, seeing there are only four pieces of pie for five people, 

promptly announces she never did care for pie.  ~Tenneva Jordan

The older I get, the more of the world that I see, and the more people I meet, the more I understand that probably the most extraordinary person I have ever known is the first person I ever met: my mom.   I was talking to a friend last night about my mother, and I told him that I have never met a more loving, patient or supportive person in my life.  That if I ever met a person who honestly didn’t like her, I’d probably die from the shock of it.  That my greatest hope is that I have been able to learn enough from watching her to be even a fraction of the mother  she is when my time comes to have children of my own. 

So, on the eve of Mother’s Day in America, here are just a few of the millions of reasons I love mine:

• OK, I’ve got to say the obvious first: she gave me life.  She made me, carried me around in her body for 40 weeks, and then underwent surgery to bring me into the world.  It’s so commonplace, people having children, that I think we sometimes forget how remarkable an act it really is.
• She always encouraged me and my brothers to choose our own paths in life, and always supported whatever we chose without reservation.  I know that most parents try to do that, but so few truly succeed at it.  They’re only human, after all.  It must be maddening to be worried about your children’s’ futures but to bite your tongue when you see them making decisions that you think may be mistakes.  My mother always seemed to understand implicitly that no mind was ever changed by nagging.  She could guide, she could set an example, but she could not choose for us.  She could only offer her support as we went about tying and untying our own knots in life.  One perfect example: despite the fears I’m sure she must have about my summer plans to live in the Guatemalan jungle at an orphanage, the only things she has ever said to me about it are “I am so proud of you,” and “How can we help?” 
• She did, however, impress us with the great importance of really trying.  Quitting was frowned upon in my family.  That’s not to say it never happened, but usually not without a fair amount of discussion and thought given to whether we were quitting because something wasn’t right, or simply because it was challenging.
• She read to me.  All the time.  And when I learned how, she sat patiently and let me read to her.
• She made hard decisions and stuck to them.  Even when we told her we’d hate her for it (oh, adolescence!).  In the time I’ve spent working with kids in my life, I’ve learned only one thing: discipline is the hardest part.  When you see their sad little faces you just want to hug them, tell them it’s ok, and back down.  But if you do that, you hurt them more than you help them.  My mother made the decision to help us be better people, even if it hurt sometimes.  That said, she rarely yelled at us and never made us feel stupid or small.  I’m sure that sometimes we must have annoyed the hell out of her.  But I don’t remember her ever making me feel it.
• She’s smart and funny and, now that I’m old enough to let her be, a great friend.

Having fun in Zakopane

Like I said, that’s only a few reasons.  And of course, I wouldn’t be the person I am now without my Dad either.  His was a different set of skills and sacrifices.  But that’s a whole different holiday.