September 25--Past and Present

2003--So, this is my first "blog."  I wonder how this will affect my writing, knowing that someone might actually read it?  I've been writing journals since I was in high school.  Always with the secret hope that someone might read them, and get to know or care about my thoughts, confusions, and yearnings.  But knowing that no one would ever read them, at least not in my lifetime.  In more recent years, I've contented myself with believing that I might be leaving a legacy...that SOMEONE might read the pages upon pages of my life's blood, and think about me when I'm gone.
This wanting to be remembered when I'm gone...this is a relatively new purpose for me.  I guess it's logical for someone my age, who has no children, to start wondering about my legacy.  Not only no children, but no social life.  No church, no job, no volunteer activities.  I sometimes wonder, if I dropped dead today, who would care besides my husband and my sisters?  And how long would THEY even care?  What would I be leaving behind?  As of this exact moment, I have to admit--not a whole lot

2004--So, anyway, one year ago today, I opened the Pandora’s Box of AOL journals. LOL! I shouldn’t really call it that…nothing bad has come out. Except maybe the guilty feeling that I’m spending too much time here that could be better spent on something else; like housework, WORK work, exercising, reading Shakespeare…all the self-improvement crap you never do anyway. The wonderful things about having this journal far outweigh the bad. As I’ve said several times, the community aspect of journal land took me completely by surprise. I didn’t even know that I was looking for a "gang" to belong to, but there you were. And you turned out to be exactly what I needed to help me make great strides in my struggle to "crawl out from under the weight of a bunch of bad years" (part of my original blurb in my "About Me" section.) That is why I chose the picture above. I felt it captured the idea that this first year of my life in journal-land was a group effort, pieced together by all the wonderful people I have come to know and care about since I started writing here one year ago today.
Thank you all for reading. Thank you for caring. Thank you for making this day a special milestone for me.

2005—I soon realized I had become part of a community of diverse people, all suffering from the common malady of wanting, or needing, to write. People who loved "journal land" to death, hyped the community to the point of burn-out and disappeared. People who bitched, moaned and grumbled about AOL and finally sailed off for brighter shores. People who found that they really couldn’t handle the strain of putting themselves out there for others to read and comment on, and flickered out like dying flames. People who wrote fiction designed to mock our general gullibility. People who immediately got hooked (raising my hand) on the experience, and just kept plugging away, no matter who read (or didn’t.)
And so I carry on, firing my political salvos interspersed with the observations of a hippie-turned yuppie-turned reluctant entrepreneur, being dragged kicking and screaming into middle age.

2006--I just realized that I have passed the three-year mark on "Coming to Terms." And what a long strange trip it’s been…
Could it possibly be only three years that I have been chained to this love/hate relationship with the world of the blog?
Surely it is longer that three years…decades, perhaps…that I have known and cherished my "friends of the ether" out in journal land.

2007                        --Happy Birthday,
                                  “Coming to Terms...”

2008--People and things that have endured at least five years of me:

My family (at least, most of them…)

My husband (31 years and counting…)

Eighteen pets… 

One or two friends…  Three homes…  Two jobs… 

…and “Coming to Terms…”

oh…and by the way, ALSO in 2008—

HAPPY FIFTH ANNIVERSARY!!!! 
BTW~~WE'RE SHUTTING YOU DOWN!!
Thanks, AOL! 
You REALLY DO SUCK!!!!
I'm sorry...I just can't believe they're doing this to us...
 
2009--Coming To Terms is coming up on its sixth birthday. Six years. Wow.

I love this little blog. I do. It means so much more to me than anyone could ever imagine. Even sans the readers and the community out of which it sprang (or into which it sprang…) I love it too much to let it go. But I’ve come to realize, without the community, I have a lot less to say here than I used to. Truth to tell, a lot of what I wrote for five years was more playing around than real writing. There were the memes and the getting-to-know-you games (remember “100 Things About Me…?) There were the bitch and moan sessions, and the “poor me” wallowing—all of which had a place and a purpose, because part of the blogging experience consisted of…well, venting. Discovering that there were others out there like me, or who appreciated or sympathized with my trauma du jour.

Now, when I want to vent, this is not the first place I come…it doesn’t seem as satisfying anymore, somehow.

Of course, some of what has been recorded here is real, solid, creditable writing. Writing of which I am inordinately proud. Writing that would never have existed without this place. And that is the thing that keeps me here. Knowing that I have done it. Knowing that I can do it still.

2010—

Since September 25th, 2003

Seven years is a pretty long time to do anything.

HB, "CtT..."

2011—

Slightly Belated...

Since September 25, 2003.

From famine through feast and back again.

2012—Posted a jibjab video that wouldn’t copy and paste…a day late.

2013—Missed the date entirely  (??!?!)

2014—

Eleven

 

11 (eleven ⁱ/ɨˈlɛvɨn/ or /iˈlɛvɛn/) is the natural number following 10 and preceding 12.
In English, it is the smallest positive integer requiring three syllables and the largest prime number with a single-morpheme name. Its etymology originates from a Germanic compound ainlif meaning "one left").

If a number is divisible by 11, reversing its digits will result in another multiple of 11.

11 is the atomic number of the element sodium.

Apollo 11 was the first manned spacecraft to land on the Moon.

  

But, most important of all

Eleven is the number of years I have maintained this blog.

As of September 25, 2014, Coming to Terms is eleven years old.

Wow.

2015--
Twelve years.  I hardly know what to write.  But I'll think of something.  See my next entry. 

As if We Could...

It started last night.

The memes, the photos, the tear-stained memorials.

Little pictures of New York, of a skyline missing two tall buildings, of flags waving, firemen kneeling, dust flying, smoke billowing…

I think we all remember that day.  How could we possibly forget it?  We watched those planes crash and those towers fall, over and over and over and over again.  In living color.  In the comfort of our family rooms.

So we really don’t need to be admonished to “never forget.”  There is no way we could ever forget.

That 2977 innocent, unsuspecting people lost their lives that day is an unthinkable tragedy.  That the families of those people were devastated by that loss compounded the tragedy ten-, twenty-, one hundred-, one thousand-fold.  That the city of New York suffered wounds that would have destroyed a lesser metropolis was a body blow to the entire country.  We don’t have to be told to “never forget” these things.  They will be with us always.

And though I have nothing but heartache for the loss of human life on that day, the thing that I can never forget, the thing that pierces my heart every time I allow myself to look back upon the events of that day, the thing with which I and all Americans must cope, day in and day out, is our changed and wounded nation.  The very fabric of America was so mangled by the events of that day, we live with the lingering damage 24/7/365.  Since 9/11/2001, Americans have faced—some bravely, some in craven fear, some with no thought except how they might be personally enriched by it—life among the ruins.

For me, 9/11 will always bring to mind the core group of cynical, power-hungry individuals who seized upon the opportunity to pervert the shock, fear, grief and anger of the American people into a seemingly bottomless profit-center.  An event that could have—SHOULD have—brought citizens together through acts of bravery, sacrifice and selflessness, encouraging us to reach out, rebuild and strive to heal, was instead turned into history’s greatest opportunity to manipulate a shocked and reeling populace through propaganda, fear-mongering,  finger-pointing and revenge-seeking.  Every negative emotion associated with the tragedy was sought out and exploited, by those who would profit from the bloodlust.  THIS was the most tragic and enduring cost of 9/11.

      

What we need to ask ourselves today is, who is it that still feels compelled to send out clarion calls to “Never Forget” to a nation of people who couldn’t forget if they dug out their own brains and stomped them into the dirt?  What possible excuse could there be to pull out a spear and poke the wounded dragon once a year on the anniversary of its crippling?

Deep inside—or maybe not so deep, given the pre-election fervor with which we are bombarded every day—I think we all know the answer.   

 

For No One

It’s been a long summer, and I am tired.  I can’t believe I can even use that word, “tired.”  It took on a whole new definition during the years we owned the restaurant.  Can it really describe what I am now experiencing—a relatively mild weariness of body and soul that is actually a hill compared to the depths of the chasm of exhaustion I lived in continually for five years?  But still…I’m tired.

The husband and I have been spending much of what might have been our free time, out and about with Café de la Rue…trying to get ourselves back to some sense of economic equilibrium.  I was preparing to reward us with a big, fat pat on the back, as we seemed to be not just getting along, not just tolerating each other, but actually becoming friends again.  And then August happened.

Lots of running around, lots to do, lots of “fun” to cram in between the responsibilities, producing the slightest nudge of stress on our tenuous connections…and they frayed apart.  They were not strong enough, yet, to withstand any sort of test.  And with that episode came the sure conviction that our relationship will never be “healed.”  It will never be what it once was—whatever that was.  I actually didn’t even know that was what I was hoping for.  I should have known better.  At any rate, when it became obvious that was not happening, it laid me pretty low for a couple of days.

It’s hard when you know, you KNOW, that you have come far from the awful place you had got to…and you see it has really made no difference to the people you hurt, caused no healing to the relationships you damaged, when you were in that awful place.  I think I get, now, why so many people just go on through life without looking back, without taking responsibility, without apologizing for their mistakes.  Because, in the end, it doesn’t make any difference.  It doesn’t heal any wounds.  It doesn’t change any minds.  It doesn’t polish your tarnished image.  It doesn’t bring back any lost love.

It just gives you false hope.

Still, I came to realize…I had to do it.  I had to heal, had to change.  I couldn’t not, if only for my own sake.  I had to take responsibility for the hurt I had caused, and apologize for it.  I know that I can get pretty oblivious…become so wrapped up in my own issues and my own pain that I don’t pay any heed to how my behavior may be affecting the people around me.  But I DO get it, eventually.  And I do let it convict me, and I do try to go back and do some damage control.  My fatal flaw, I guess.  Better to remain mindful and not do the damage in the first place.  But apparently, that is a lesson I have never learned.  And my life has been defined by that.  I leave a trail of destruction behind me…and then I have the bad fortune to look back and regret it. 

How does one go forward, now, with this knowledge?  My first reaction was to just…give up.  Why should I try…why should I work on undoing the damage I’ve wrought, why should I put out any emotional effort at all, when in the end, it makes no difference to anyone?  It changes nothing.  I wanted to sharpen up my porcupine spines, roll up in a ball and DARE anybody to touch me.  And maybe I would even pluck out some of those sharp spines and throw them at people once in a while, just for the pleasure of sharing my pain with them. 

But that wouldn’t do, would it?  I’ve worked hard for four and a half years to put that angry, lonely, stressed and hopeless person back in her box and keep a lid on her.  Nobody liked that person.  I didn’t like that person.  I don’t want to be her again.  It makes no sense to let her back out just because I’ve discovered that the people I love are never going to forgive me for letting her out in the first place.

Even if nobody else cares who I am any more…I care.  And if nobody else forgives me, it’s that much more important that I forgive myself.  Because how can you keep going forward—and if I’ve learned one thing, it’s that life is a forward journey—if you don’t?

So forward I will go.  With no expectations of changing anyone but myself.  Which is a lesson well learned, I think.    

Forty Years In

Well, now I know.

"Love"--who even knows what it means, in the context of two people attempting a lifelong journey in it--isn't constant, or dependable, or stable, or never-changing.

And not, sadly, everlasting.

Once it goes away, it does not come back.  At least, not in the form it was in when it left.

Forty-year love is more glue than magnetism...   The irresistible attraction that came over us at the beginning of the journey has changed over time to steel  fibers of shared history, rendering us inseparable.  The romance is gone...the interdependency is everything.

After 40 years of everything that the lives of two people can throw at it--even two "normal", boring, traditional and unadventurous people like my husband and me--the thing that binds us bears little resemblance to the awesome power that drew us together in the first place.    

And I have found that forgiveness does not seem to be a part of this old love.

I thought it could be.  Who doesn't want to believe that love, once chased away, can be brought back, good as new?  Who doesn't think that if you've angered or disappointed the one you love, all it will take is a little change here, a little backtracking there, to make it all better and get back to the love (you thought) you always had?

But, no...  That's not what happens.  There is, apparently, no going back. 

There are only moments of clarity--shocking moments, heart-wrenching moments--when you look at this misshapen, stained, worn and tattered thing that you have between you, that was once new and bright and fierce...and you see it for what it is. 

And you either fold it up, put it back in your heart and keep going...

...or you decide it's not enough to keep you going anymore. 

For now...

It's enough.   

I Can't Make You Love Me

...Or Not

Looks, after all, like I am not "home."  And looking more and more like I never will be.

I think...

...I give up. 

On Reaching the End of Another Decade #2

Sunsets are part of the addiction for those of us who love our Oregon coast.  Sometimes, like Thursday night, the sun merely disappears unremarkably into the gray swirl of offshore mist.  Other times, when the sinking molten orb strikes the right combination with clouds floating above the western horizon, the results are breathtaking...magical.

Last night was such a night.  I grabbed my camera and ran outside.  But it soon became obvious that my location--far from the sea and east of a wide expanse of golf course--was not going to produce anything remarkable in the way of sunset pictures (of which I have a jillion.). So I wandered back into the kitchen and set my camera down, prepared to turn my attention to the next vacation activity.

But something made me stop short, turn around and head back out the door.  I didn't want to be inside...not yet.  I wanted to watch the sunset, not necessarily take pictures of it. I am an incorrigible photographer, and sometimes the camera gets between me and the experience I'm trying to record.  So I crept back outside, away from the general vacation hubbub, found a cozy seat on the front porch steps, where the concrete was still warm from the eight-hour onslaught of afternoon sun, sat down, and just...watched.  

And in the back of my mind grew a thought...that on this, my milestone birthday weekend, perhaps the Creator had something to show me this evening in the darkening night sky.  Surely I could even boldly ask for a message...a sign.  Perhaps in the form of one of the bird spirits upon whom I have come to depend.  My mind formed the request, though not in actual words, not like a prayer.  It was communication much deeper than words.  More like an inner nod, acknowledging that I had requested and the Creator would answer.

Time seemed to slow as the kaleidoscope that was the sunset sky turned, the colors simultaneously deepening and brightening.  Gold to glowing peach to scarlet to deep red to pink, each color, each change never seeming to begin or end, and yet the changes came and went.  It was a long, drawn out show, so lovely and so surprising in its variation and length.  From time to time I would sneak a peek above my head to see if the Creator had yet sent the message I had requested.   After a time, I lost patience (surprise) and complained petulantly, "You haven"t sent me that sign I asked for...!"

To which the Universe replied, "What about this magnificent sunset?  Isn't that enough for you?"

Chastened, I returned my attention to the light show on the western horizon. 

By and by, the message that the Creator had for me dawned as the last light of the sun faded from the sky, on what I had convinced myself was the last day before the beginning of my own personal sunset.

"Sunsets are beautiful.  They can surprise, and they can enchant.  As they reach their finish, they wring every last bit of loveliness from every last ray of sun before it disappears below the horizon.  And that can take a surprisingly long time.

"And then...

"...the stars come out."

On Reaching the End of Another Decade #1

So here I am, sitting on a cheap plastic adirondack chair, on the crumbling pad of concrete that serves as a patio in the back yard of a vacation cottage in one of the tonier areas of the Oregon coast. Apparently the owners would like renters to imagine that the shabbiness of the place elevates it to the level of "kitsch."  The little one level, lap-sided house squats on its lot along a block otherwise populated by shingled cottages with steep shake roofs, colonnaded verandas and gabled attics...like a toadstool in a forest of stately pines.  But it has no wish to fade into the background and be unnoticed, here in its old age.  In this row of younger, shapelier homes clad in trendy, weather-worn shingles of the upscale coastal resort, our little cottage is painted unabashedly...orange.

Sitting here writing this, I am of course struck by what a metaphor this little house is for ME...my life and the realities thereof, on the eve of my 60th birthday.  I have to admit, I admire the pluck of this little place.  I wish I could apply some of it to my own appearance issues--the sagging face, the turkey neck, the work-worn hands, the slouching posture.  My hair has become such a disaster that I have seriously considered shaving my head and having my scalp tattooed with intricate, colorful paisleys and flowers.  

I've never been pretty...on my best days, pleasant-looking has been the highest standard to which I could aspire.  And I have been okay with that, and with enhancing my appearance with a certain flair for the dramatic that has kept me distinct from the wallflowerish background into which I would have otherwise been destined to fade.  But over the past decade or so, I've struggled to keep up with the physical changes of my aging body.  Presentable on my best days has begun inexorably sliding into cronishness.  I never minded not being beautiful...never gave it much thought, actually.  And yet, I seem to be having a rough time accepting ugliness.   Why can I not celebrate it, wear it like a badge of honor, like this dumpy little mid-century cottage in which I'll sleep the last few nights before my big 6-0, proudly sporting its peeling orange paint and crumbling concrete?

I'm pretty sure I have at least a couple more posts on this subject swimmimg around, bound to come out in the next couple of hours/days...

Proud

The Fourth of July is creeping up on us again.  It’s always an uncomfortable time for me, because I am so allergic to the concepts of patriotism, nationalism, flag-worship and glorification of the military that move to the front and center of our national consciousness on that day.  In recent years…oh, since the onset of the Bush Administration, I’d say…I have taken particular exception to crows of “I’m PROUD to be an American!!!”, and their accompanying  tacit accusations that you are a Communist, Socialist, Nazi, traitor, heathen or demon if you disagree.

Why should I be any more proud to be an American than I am of having brown hair, brown eyes, long legs or pleasant features?  I may be fortunate to be beautiful, or white, or of European heritage, or American-born. But these are happy accidents of birth.  How can I be proud of things I did nothing to achieve?  Naturalized American citizens may be proud to be Americans.  They wanted it.  They worked for it.  They achieved it.  But those of us who were born here?  Not so much. 

So the whole idea of being “proud to be an American” is, to me, semantically erroneous.   The correct statement might be:  “I’m proud of America.”  Which I would be happy to declare from the highest rooftop.

If it were true.

That being more the source of my peevishness at the concept than my grammatical objection to the way it’s expressed.

For weeks, my mind has been grumbling over the seeds of an Independence Day rant, one that enumerated all of the very obvious reasons why I am NOT, currently, proud of my home country; and why no one else should be, either.  A Do-Nothing Congress.  The 2016 GOP Presidential Clown Show.  Shamelessly expanding income inequality.  Ferguson.  Baltimore.  Open-carry fanatics toting AR15’s around on the streets.  A black child shot to death for possession of a toy gun.  A neo-Nazi white kid treated to Burger King after his arrest for murdering nine black people in cold blood. 

Should we be proud of all that?  Good god, it’s all I can do not to pack my bags and leave.  But what country would have us?  Who wants to start taking in streams of disgusted, disappointed, disaffected refugees from the American moral wasteland?  We must be something akin to human toxic waste.  Nope.  We’re stuck here, god have mercy on our souls.

So there’s that…but I hadn’t quite got round to articulating all that when last week happened.

When news out of the current Supreme Court session began blowing across this wasted land like a fresh breeze.

When the highest court in the land proved its mettle and rose up to the sacred duty entrusted to it by the framers of the Constitution--that document of which so many in this country are so woefully ignorant; that sacred manual for democracy which the charlatans would cherry-pick like the bible, billboarding the parts that serve their purposes, sweeping under the carpet the parts that do not.

It’s times like this that we get a sense of the great, scholarly wisdom of our Founding Fathers; that we understand the genius of the three branches of government, of the concept of checks and balances, of the delicate tightrope walk of ensuring that no one division of the federal government has more power than the other two.  What a monumental task, for these men to erect the framework of a government the like of which the world had never seen.  What insight they had to call upon, what comprehension of the strengths and the weaknesses of human nature.  What understanding they possessed of the lure and danger of political power, and yet, of the capacity for human cooperation and accomplishment.

This group of learned 18^th-century political zealots hammered together a government that still works, in spite of all the ways we have tried to sabotage it over the years.  This time around, the Supreme Court came to the rescue, reinforcing the lines that an out-of-control political movement may not cross.  We may not protect bigotry and moral decay under the mantle of “states rights.”  We may not deny civil rights to any group just because we don’t like them, or we don’t agree with them, or they are not like us.  It was not okay back in 1954 under Brown v Board of Education.  And it is not okay now. 

In this upside down, contentious country, this heaving mass of conflicting theories, where right is wrong and lies are truth, and we are all daily invited to choose our own realities, and where the hapless Legislative Branch of our federal government has exploited every human foible and dragged us to the brink of economic and moral ruin, the Supreme Court stood up among the chaos and quietly reaffirmed that upon which our country was founded:  That all Americans are created equal, and the blessings of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness were established for all Americans. 

Should we be proud of all that?

You’re damned right we should.