Yeah, yeah, the holidays

 There's nothing to say about the holidays because my holidays are not your holidays and so my report would be boring and of little interest to anyone else. At least that's what I think. Who wants to read or listen about someone else's traditions?  It's fine for a few minutes and then your attention drifts because, honestly, what one person loves is often dull and moronic to someone else.  Why would anyone care if I love to eat fresh crab with my kids on Christmas Eve? Everyone I know and love already knows that's what I do, so writing about it is trite. Doing nothing for New Year's Eve is what pretty much everyone does so there's nothing new about that. 

However, one thing that was rather nice was spending two nights in a lovely hotel in Mendocino, courtesy of John and Diane, with the kids and all our dogs. I don't know anyone else who gets to do that. It was a great start to a slow, plodding holiday season. I could go back and do it again tomorrow.

Not to be depressing but a lot of famous people died in the last two weeks, something that doesn't often happen in Holiday Time.  Most important to me was Joan Didion, probably my favorite writer. I have been reading her essays and books for about 50 years and will start re-reading them for the fourth or fifth or tenth time. John Madden also died; I am not even a mediocre football fan but I did like Madden. He at least made commentary fun. He seemed like a nice man, too.

Betty White died, she was funny and silly and a lot of people were big fans of hers. Stephen Sondheim also left us, as did Desmond Tutu and Bob Dole.  And still thousands died of Covid.  December deaths are not what one thinks about when the word "holiday" comes up but there you have it.  

Bottom line, I hope you all had a great, exciting, dramatic and profitable holiday season. Now we are done with it all, just need to pack away the few xmas ornaments that were taken out to create some kind of holiday cheer and that will be that. 

Ho-Ho. Hum.

Angels in the Architecture

 Lately I have been thinking about dead people. Not just people I once knew in real-life but dead people in general. Their spirits, mostly. What happens to our spirit, our "soul" if that sounds better to you, after we die?  No one knows, of course, no one even knows if we have a spirit or a soul or if we are just matter. Our spirit wouldn't be matter, of course, but maybe it is our consciousness because no one can really put their finger on what physically constitutes consciousness. 

There's no specific reason this has been on my mind now; it is on my mind most of the time. Like some people I know, I talk to dead people quite often. Something happens, like I see a group of does and fawns and I say "Oh, Mom check that out!  I know you always liked deer, so look at those!"  I say this out loud, of course.  Once you begin to equate actions and situations with a now-dead person, it is amazing how often the connections are there. Something will remind me of my Dad, my Mom, my friend Martha, and once I comment on it to them, more and more things occur that remind me of them.  Or I think about John Prine for a second and in another second there's a John Prine song playing on the radio or on Pandora, just randomly.

I don't know if others out there experience this, but it gives me faith and belief that some spirits stick around us and are listening to us.  Sometimes they help us out (Thank you, St. Anthony) and sometimes they come to us for comfort or to assuage loneliness or to make us open our eyes to a bit of wonder or beauty. The flower stream I presented this past year on Instagram, posting a single flower each day for 9 months, gave me a temporary reprieve from some of the ugliness of the world. And I felt like my personal spirits were helping.....beautiful flowers presented themselves to me in odd, unexpected ways and I got to share those with anyone who was looking. 

I currently work in a small hotel that has been in existence for close to 100 years. There are stately redwoods on the property, old-growth hydrangeas and camellias and dahlias that are six feet tall.  And there are spirits on that property, benign spirits that exude peace and tranquility. You can feel it when you walk around the property, a feeling of calm and peaceful resignation and hope. I've never worked at a place that felt so safe and accommodating and I am 100% sure it's due to those old, dead souls who still hang around because it was their special place when they were alive.  

Nothing profound here, just my mind rambling on.

Sometimes the magic works.....

 ... and sometimes it doesn't.

That's a quote from the movie "Little Big Man" from 1970, with Dustin Hoffman.  This is not a movie review but those eight words stick with me because they are like life: sometimes it's good, sometimes it's not.  Sometimes the cards fall  your way, sometimes you bottom out, deuces and threes instead of tens and queens.

I am not a fan of the word "magic" or "magical" used in an every day context. To me magic is studied trickery, slight of hand, conjuring, fooling the eye, fooling the mind. Life isn't that. Yes, we all experience moments that feel 'magical' but I still don't like using that word for anything less than transcendence and that experience is too rare to even discuss here. So, leaving "magic" and all its incarnations aside, let's talk about luck.

(And now I am floundering because, honestly, I don't even know what I started writing about and here I am, still typing away.  I could/should start over but no, not taking that road. Whatever made me begin on this path will either carry me on or lead me astray and I will be fine with that.)

Luck: who has it? Who gets it? Why does it touch one person and not the other? Is there even such a thing as luck, just as is there even such a thing as magic? Do you feel lucky, are you lucky, has your life been blessed (!) with luck?  What the fuck is luck?

Don't know. Don't care. Yes, it's lucky, perhaps, if you find a $100 bill on the sidewalk. Yes, it's lucky, perhaps, if you put that $100 on a red square on a roulette wheel. And yes, it's lucky, perhaps, if that spin of that roulette wheel comes up red and you win a bunch of money.  And then what? Does your life change? Perhaps yes if you win $100,000.  But perhaps not.

So, luck. So, magic. Joan Didion wrote a remarkable book about the death of her husband and her daughter titled "The Year of Magical Thinking" which has nothing to do with luck or magic but explains, to me, that theory of what magic means to many. In our small and uncertain lives here on this uncertain planet, sometimes we want to believe something so viscerally that we think about it so much until it becomes real to us. We internalize it, we live it, we want it to be real and 'magically' it happens. It becomes real to us. It is, indeed, magical thinking. But at the same time, that thinking doesn't change the reality. It just smooths it over for a while. It mitigates the pain.

Whew. There is no resolution here. Just the recognition that it is time to go to bed. Thank you for following along.  More to come.

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Thank you.

There are too many people to thank specifically, but there are an equal number of things to be thankful for.  Here are a few:  I am thankful for simply being alive at this moment and healthy.  I am thankful for the health of those I love (and even those I like) and for all the love that comes my way.  For being able to sit in a warm house with gingerbread muffins cooling on the table, for having enough money to live comfortably for this moment. For living in a beautiful area, in a lovely little cottage on an amazing property.  

My children, Jenn and Gabe, and their mates Dar and Annie, my world would not be half as good without them buzzing around my life. I am grateful for their love, their help and their advice, their criticism and their praise, for the future they want for me and for themselves. And my additional daughter Stacey who is a shining star to me. 

My siblings, as much as they might make me crazy at times, they also are part of my life foundation and therefore important in that genetic shorthand sort of way that only siblings can understand. Friends: old ones like Flip, whom I have loved since I was 18 years old, and new ones like Cath and Dawn and all the ones in the middle, Tom, Kara, Pat, John and Diane, and so many more. People who will call me when they need me because they know I will do the same. People I love, pure and simple.

I am thankful for the past and the present and I hope to be thankful for the future, although that sometimes looks dicey. I am so grateful for all the traveling that came my way, all the countries and cities I have seen and hope to see again.  (Paris has been calling me recently, like a siren, urging me to walk its streets again soon. I need to answer that call.)

Bottom line, thank you to the universe for letting me have such an abundant amount of things to be thankful for.  (Bad grammar!) 

Be grateful, be kind, be happy.  

Smell this! What do you see?

We smell something and immediately our brain conjures up a memory, a picture from the past. How this happens isn't a mystery, at least from the scientific point of view. It all relates to the olfactory bulb which connects smells to the area of our brains that store memories.  (How our brains can even store a memory when memory is so mercurial is an amazing feat.)  So when we smell a certain scent, our brain wakes up the memory and we can see it as an immediate, almost tangible thing.

At this moment my house smells like Thanksgiving. There is bread rising so it's a bit yeasty but there are turkey legs in a pot being slowly turned into turkey broth that will end up being delicious gravy for Thanksgiving dinner. Sage, parsley, rosemary, garlic, onions, so many aromatics infuse my small cottage with the smell of so many past holidays. All I need to do now is bake a pumpkin pie and it would be perfect!  Cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger and cloves would round out the scent menu and my mouth would be watering all day long.

But think of all the things we smell that trigger great (or not-so-great) memories: the smell of freshly cut grass evokes long, hot summer days. Pipe smoke (very rare these days) reminds me of my Dad who occasionally smoked a pipe and mixed his own tobacco.  After-shave lotion reminds me of Macy's department store, walking past the aisle that sold men's personal care products. Incense brings back memories of the late 1960's, sitting cross-legged on someone's bedroom floor, listening to Jefferson Airplane albums and drinking cheap wine.

But some smells go both ways: wood smoke always smelled like winter to me but now it also has the frightening connection to wildfires. Both of those memories are triggered at the same time.

Right now I am enjoying the smells of the holidays coming out of my kitchen. Turkey stock and baking bread definitely invoke the beginning of the holiday season and I am enjoying every memory the smells create. 

Bond. James Bond. Shaken. Not Stirred.

One of the first movies I saw independently, without parental oversight, was "Goldfinger."  In a theater, with my brothers and another boy. We were all probably 15 -16 except maybe Steve, who had to be old enough to drive.... so maybe 1965. Every detail of that movie (the ones I remember) are so clear and precise to me now, more than 55 years later.  (I am fainting as I see the number 55, all those years gone by.) Sean Connery was so young, thin, debonair, carefree. That the movie was just that, a movie, a fiction, nothing anchored in reality, didn't matter one tiny bit. 

The James Bond movies have always grabbed me, especially the early ones and now the last of the line. Daniel Craig isn't Sean Connery but it really doesn't matter.  James Bond is still James Bond. Even Pierce Brosnan was fine for a short while because it is all about the adventure, the incredible action sequences and the gadgets, the girls and the gritty escapes that make Bond Bond. (And the martinis.)

The new movie is good, packed with everything one wants in a Bond movie and more. The scenery is gorgeous, the explosions are huge, the sex is hot, the Aston Martin is so cool, the intrigue is confusing and the villains are what they should be: evil and cunning and death-defying. It's a movie to see on the big screen, but only if you like Bond movies. There's nothing about it that is redemptive or cozy and warm. But then, Bond movies were never about that. You like them or you don't.

I do.

 

Parents, kids and the chasms

 As my kids get older (both in their mid-forties) I am unsure what my position is in their lives. More important, I am not sure what their position is in my life. They are my children, yes, but I can't refer to them as that. Children are small. These two people are grown-ups.  I can call them "my kids" and I do, but that's a misnomer as well. But what is the correct term for one's grown-up offspring?  There isn't one. Well, yes, you could say "progeny" or "descendants" or some such thing but no one does and those words aren't what I am looking for.

But I digress. My grown-up progeny (!) certainly don't need a parent now and I don't need to be a parent either. (Although I am sure I mother my kids more than I suspect. My daughter will call me on it now and then. My son is too discreet to do so unless I specifically ask.)  So how does one define one's relationship to one's grown children at this point in one's life?  (Too many one's there, but whatever.)

It's a good bet that my kids still see me as their parent because why wouldn't they?  It's all I have been in their lives. However, while I am still their parent, I don't see myself in that role now. My role, to me, is a bit unclear, but they don't need a parent. That job was made redundant years ago. Do I even have a role and if so, what is it?

Herein lies the chasms. We have these children, we nurture them, protect them, teach them and love them unconditionally. There is no chasm.  As children, we (the parental figures) are their entire world and for a while they are ours as well. Eventually a small fissure occurs, usually when we take them to school or day care, some place other than their home. They are separated from us. Then comes the day when they are seriously in school, away from us for 6 - 8 hours a day. That's a huge split, one that causes sadness and pain for both the parent and the child. (The tiny relief and joy that parents feel when the kids are off to school and thus not hounding us 6 - 8 hours a day is not relevant here. Just saying. And yes, learning occurs, but still, not relevant here.) 

The huge chasm comes when the child realizes that there is another world out there, one without Parental Figures. This usually happens around the age of 11-14, perhaps earlier these days. Once the kid is in middle school and definitely in high school, that chasm is huge. The child needs independence.  The parent doesn't know how to deal with this.  The child wins, of course, because the parent knows that's the point of being a parent and the point of being a child: leaving the nest/home/safety. So the parent needs to let go. Or make a valiant attempt to do so.

The chasm is the distance the child needs to become a real person. (Note that I am not saying "adult" because a lot of adults are not real people.) The separation is the point. The chasm is the point. We, the parents, do not need to like it but unless we are idiots we always knew it would happen and we must accept it. 

So now, the dilemma: we made these children with the clear intent that they would leave us and become new, whole people but .... now what?  Their role is clear: go out and get a life.  What's ours now? Yes, sometimes they come back and start over but eventually they are gone from our loving and happy home grasp and what is our job at that point regarding these adult children, kids, progeny?

It is clear that this is a topic I should have addressed 20 years ago. And I probably did. But now I see my adult kids and other than teaching them my skills at making pasta carbonara or giving them my recommendations about books to read, wines to drink, TV stuff to watch, my job is pretty much done. Well, it's not pretty much... it is done. They are whole people, they do not need a parent. They can both make a very good carbonara (I am still the best at that) and they have their own tastes in books and music and movies. Thankfully so. 

Do they need me? Perhaps, but for what?  At least I know they like me enough to want to hang out now and then.  Is that a need or a want?  Hopefully a want.

I am still figuring this relationship stuff out, as is obvious.  There is more to say here. I will report back.  Thank you for reading.