A Beautiful Day

It was an absolutely gorgeous day up here in the Northwest.  Sunny (almost unheard of this time of year), and the temperature must have ultimately nudged 60 degrees.  Lucy and I geared up and went for a walk up the hill behind the neighborhood.  I took along the digital camera so I could share some images of the beginning of spring with those of you who won't be seeing it for awhile yet.

The sounds were really better thant the sights.  All the birds chattering...chickadees, stellar and scrub jays, song sparrows and crows.  There is an old walnut orchard down the block...the crows gather there by the dozens, collect nuts, and then fly over the streets and drop them to the pavement to crack them open.  When I'm walking, I try to help them out by stepping on any uncracked nuts I come across!  And the smells...many die-hards around here still heat with wood. On chilly mornings, the air is always redolent with woodsmoke.

The mountains were out today...Mt. Hood, Mt. Adams, and Mt. St. Helens were beaming, in their coats of brilliant white snow against the bright blue sky.  I tried to get a picture, but the digital camera couldn't capture it.  Don't know if the problem is with me or the camera... 

I wish everyone could plan a visit to Oregon in spring.  It's absolutely the best time of year! 

A Chain Email I Actually LIKED

Today is International Very Good Looking Damn Smart People Day, so please send this message to someone you think fits this description.

Please do not send it back to me as I have already received it over fifty thousand times and my inbox is jammed full!

Grace

I was at the pool yesterday, beating the crap out of myself once again.  (The other day, a lady in the next lane said, "My, you sure work hard with all those weights and things."  My reply was, "Sometimes I win, sometimes they win."  Cracked up the lifeguard.)

One of the young women who works out at the pool is missing her right leg from about five inches below her knee joint.  She doesn't let it stop her, though...  She looks a lot better in her bathing suit than I do in mine!   She's completely unselfconscious about her leg.  Yesterday, on the way back to the locker room after her swim, she stopped to talk to a little guy in the kids' pool.  She was congratulating him on how far he could swim...said pretty soon he'd be swimming in the big pool.  

"Where's your leg?"  he asked, as kids will inevitably do.

"It's in there (the locker room) waiting for me.  It's a fake one, so I can't get it wet.  I have to take it off when I swim."

She took it right in her stride, as if it was the most natural thing in the world to be missing a leg.  What grace in the face of adversity!  It made me wonder what I would be doing if the same thing happened to me.  I probably wouldn't be seen in a swimsuit in public, much  less stopping to talk to little kids in the shallow pool.  I KNOW I wouldn't have been able to deal with the questions.  This girl deserves a medal or something.  What an ambassador for people with disabilites...and you know, I bet she doesn't think of herself as disabled at all.

Just goes to show that the challenges really do go to those who can handle them the best.  Or that a heaping helping of grace goes along with them.     

Shoes (1 of 2)

This is my first pair of three-inch spike heels. My ankles wobbled worse than a 12-year-old's. (And Ginger Rogers danced backwards in these??) But they sure looked hot.Too bad all that glamour (read PAIN) was wasted...

Shoes (2 of 2)

How do I explain Columbia County to people who live in places where there are actually...people? Just under 44,000 souls inhabit the entire county. Cattle, horses, sheep, and llamas probably outnumber the people by about 5 to 1. So when we decided to go to a dance at the Columbia County Fairgrounds (home of the Columbia County Fair and Rodeo) I'm sure I wasn't expecting an evening at the Ritz. When I donned my silly sexy shoes and velvet skirt and sequined top, I knew there was a chance that I might be a tad overdressed.

When we drove up, other attendees were jumping down from their 4 x 4's, wearing their cleanest jeans and cowboy boots. Some of the more decked-out women had velvet or glitter on their tee-shirts. You could tell a man was really out to impress if he had worn his leather jacket instead of his denim.

The evening had been touted as "A Taste of Columbia County." The county's best restaurants were to be represented, serving gourmet tidbits. Well, let's see, one table featured five boxes of cold pizza from Scappoose's premier pizza parlor. Our local three-star family restaurant offered five crock-pots full of luke-warm soup, served in pink paper cups. There was cold Mexican food, more cold pizza, a guy trying to cook "gourmet" sausages on a George Foreman grill...

So there I sat, trying to look inconspicuous (wrapped in my gold satin shawl), sipping champagne from a plastic "Jack Daniels" cup and gnawing on a barbecued rib that was like chewing on my dog's rawhide bone. (Hey, the champagne was Korbel, they charged $2 for that big honkin' glass...it went a long way toward easing my discomfort about my wardrobe choice.)

The band. Um...the lead singer wore...a yellow leisure suit jacket? LOUD, and the acoustics were so bad, conversation was impossible. Dancing? I don't think so. Not in those shoes. We finished eating…and hit the door. Went to a bar, had a quiet glass of wine, and talked (now that we could.) Then home. And that was when the evening really picked up...

       

On Lying Well

I have a problem with lying. I can’t do it, or at least, I can’t do it well. The little stupid lies that most people don’t think twice about, I worry and fret over, and am convinced I’ll get busted. It’s hardly worth the ulcer.

This is a problem, you ask? Actually, YES. For one thing, during my thirty years in the workforce, I would have benefited from being able to tell a good lie. The people who can spew the best bullshit are the ones who climb the ladder the quickest. Those of us not gifted with that ability usually end up crouched at the bottom of the ladder, and the silver-tongued fibbers use us as the first step. I could never brown-nose or butt-kiss…it’s just another form of lying. (And a particularly gross one, judging by the terminology alone…) It wasn’t that I didn’t do it because I had some huge moral objection to it. It just never occurred to me. I have not a smidgen of natural talent for it.

This total inability to lie convincingly has also kept me honest in my personal finances. There’s no way I could ever hope to schmooze my way out of a bad debt situation…."The check is in the mail…" I always swore they could hear my nose growing over the telephone.

Honest people are probably the biggest suckers in the world. You have an expectation that when someone says something, it’s true…since that’s the way it works for YOU. I wish I had a nickel for every line of bullshit I have swallowed hook, line, and sinker. It’s terrible to try and be a boss when you’re saddled with this affliction. Your employees learn quickly that any half-baked story will do to get them out of trouble. Somebody could have the missing $20 from the till sticking out of their pocket, and if they told me they didn’t take it, I’d probably believe them. God knows what would have happened if I had kids.

Well, you can’t say I never learn. At this advanced age, I’m finally able to recognize bull when I hear it. The other day, one of my sisters told me a real whopper. I wanted to believe her so badly that I made up a whole scenario in my head that explained what happened as an honest mistake. When it turned out she really WASN’T telling the truth, I was of two minds about the whole thing. I felt somehow victorious that I had sniffed out this lie (after the equivalent of being hit in the head with a baseball bat.) But, knowing my sister had lied to me did NOT make me happy. Sometimes it felt better just being a sucker.

Election Rant

Oregon has what is known as the "Initiative System." Any group with an axe to grind and enough signatures on a petition can get a measure put on the ballot. If it passes, it becomes law. Things like the anti-gay legislation in Springfield and Canby became law in this way, when voters who thought the measures hateful but frivolous DIDN’T vote, and the local homophobes DID. Once in a while, something worthwhile will come out of this process, like Oregon’s ground-breaking "Right-to-Die" law. The system is also used by the taxpayers to micro-manage Oregon’s tax system. Yesterday’s election was an embarrassing example of this.

Oregon suffered in the eighties. The major timber companies had cut down all the trees they could reach, and left in droves to find greener pastures. We scrambled for living wage jobs. Eventually, we hitched our wagon to the high-tech train, which gave us a helluva ride through the nineties. But when high-tech tanked a couple of years ago, we went with it.

During the high-flying days of the high-tech boom, the state of Oregon spent like drunken sailors. They instituted programs, like the Oregon Health Plan, that were compassionate, admirable, and expensive. Never gave a moment’s thought to what would happen if the money suddenly went away. And, here’s the clincher. In Oregon, if the state collects more money than it needs, it gives it back. This is called the "kicker." The checks go out right before Christmas, so we can all buy a couple hundred dollars more worth of things we don’t need. I would get the check, and think, Why don’t they just put this away somewhere for a rainy day?

It’s raining now. The legislature worked months past their adjournment date last fall to hammer out a package that would balance the fat budget. They came up with a "tax surcharge," at a cost to the average taxpayer of about $100 a year…half the money given back with those stupid "kicker" checks. But…welcome to the "Initiative System." As the ink dried on the legislature’s hard-won bi-partisan agreement, they KNEW it was doomed.

So, the Oregon Health Plan, not to mention schools, Medicaid, police, and other vital services, get screwed...because Oregon voters are too stingy to give up $100 a year they might spend on five cases of beer. And because our legislature is too stupid to figure out that the gravy train occasionally runs out of gas.

Remembering Dad

Things I remember about Dad that make me smile:

When he decided to propose to my mother, he asked a co-worker at the Merchandise Mart where there was "a good jewelry store" in town (Chicago.) My mother received a registered blue-white diamond from C.D. Peacock. It cost him a month’s pay.

He loved to tend his veggie garden. At one home, we had the worst impermeable clay soil you could imagine. He managed to coax tomatoes, corn, beans (tons of beans), and cute little stunted carrots that could only push so far down into the clay.

Fishing was his major hobby. Going through old photos to make up a montage for his memorial, we found about 50% of pictures we had of Dad also featured some quantity of dead fish.

He was a voracious reader, and he remembered just about everything he read. He was a bottomless font of knowledge. When we had questions, he ALWAYS had answers. We thought he was the smartest man in the world.

Dad was the family cook. He had his successes and his failures. Many foods that made me gag when I was a kid, I later found out were quite tasty…as long as Dad wasn’t cooking them. But he could barbecue a heck of a Thanksgiving turkey (picture this in Illinois in November.) Every square inch of counter and cupboard space in his kitchen was crammed with gadgets of every size and description. And when he cooked, it never occurred to him that he should use something, clean it off, and use it again. He had enough back-ups available to grab a clean whatever-it-was. He made a mountain of dishes for even the simplest meal, then he’d get up from the table and relax in front of the TV with a book, while someone ELSE cleaned up.

When I was about 10, he brought home a huge, incredibly heavy blue canvas tent, a Coleman lantern and camp stove, and that was the start of our family camping experience. We made trips to see the grandparents in Oregon, visited Yellowstone and Glacier Parks in the west, did the New England coast one year. He was never happier than when we were out in the woods somewhere, or sampling a bit of the local history of some distant part of the country.

When I was in high school, I knitted him a scarf. He wore that scarf through many subsequent Chicago winters. After several years, I asked him why he still wore that ridiculous ugly scarf I’d made. He said, "It’s warm." It now hangs on the hall tree in my family room. It still smells like him.

I Still Miss You, Dad

Super Bowl Sunday brings me mixed emotions these days. Five years ago, we were watching the Super Bowl with my dad, and waiting for him to die. He had esophageal cancer that had spread through his digestive system…he’d had 90% of his stomach removed four months earlier to try to delay the inevitable. His 79-year-old body just never recovered from the surgery, and succumbed to the cancer faster than he would have without it, in my opinion. Don’t get me started on the wonders of modern medicine when it comes to geriatric patients….

I think about him today. I still miss him so much…I can’t believe it’s been five years since he was here with us. I wrote this the day he died. I thought I would share it here:

February 2, 1999

It is on this date that I must record the death of my father. He died at about 9:45 this morning. A rainy, blustery, Oregon winter Tuesday morning.

…Even an hour before he died, you could tell he was still fighting. He was too weak to even be conscious, but you could see his lips moving and his face twitching, his head shaking…whether he was trying to "shake off" the encroaching darkness of death, or arguing with those on the other side who were urging him to cross over, I don’t know. But I could tell he wanted none of it.

Luckily, we had a good hospice nurse with us who told him what we couldn’t find it in our hearts to tell him: That his body was trying to die, and that we loved him, but that he needed to find peace now. He needed that permission to die, and I was unable to give it. I knew how hard he had been fighting, and how much he didn’t want to die. … I knew Dad was struggling with it, and I just couldn’t be the one to tell him he’d lost.

Hospice told us that we had done a good job. That we should be proud of ourselves. That we carried out his wish to die at home…the wish that he never really voiced in so many words. ..But we did make it happen, and we didn’t kill each other. I think that can be credited to him. To dad, who was everything good about our family. Who inspired us to be moral, caring people, people who love each other because we are family, and look past each others’ flaws.

I love him so much. And I can’t for the life of me imagine the world without him. …he was my dad…I have never known life without him. And at this moment, I just feel like a lost little girl.

Swimming Pool Philosophy

Somebody wrote this on, of all places, the chalkboard at the pool: "Life is a tragedy to those who feel, and a comedy to those who think." Pretty heady stuff for a bunch of soggy jocks! It made me think though. Would that "thinkers" and "feelers" were so easily categorized. I’m certainly not one or the other. Sometimes I think I’m the worst of both worlds.

I’m a very inward person. I live 97% of my life inside my head. I’ve always been that way. I’m too sensitive, and when I’m hurt, I don’t fight…I just retreat into myself. I have bat-like hearing for anything negative. When it comes to compliments, strokes, admiration, atta-boys….I’m deaf as a post. I wish I knew why. If there were some horrible childhood experience that would explain this quirk, maybe I could work it out. But it just seems to be an essential part of the way I AM. Like I was born this way. So, am I one of those "feelers" for whom life is a tragedy? Maybe.

But I believe I’ve got a little bit of the "thinker" in me, too. Despite my magnetic attraction for negative energy, I still have the ability to stand outside myself and analyze things. When I start to slide too quickly or too deeply into that pit, I can yell, "Hold it!" and just stop for a second and get my bearings. Look at the situation with as little emotion as possible, and judge whether it really merits that headlong flight into myself. Laugh if I need to, or just say, "Whoa…this isn’t that important." It’s a good thing, really, that I have this ability. If I didn’t, they probably would have tossed me into the loony bin years ago. That doesn’t really make me a "thinker", though does it? Just a "feeler" with enough sense of self-preservation to know when to stop feeling.

I started this journal entry with the intention of proving that one is not either a thinker or a feeler, and using myself as an example that we are all both. What I’ve actually done is make a pretty strong case for myself being a card-carrying "feeler." But I sure don’t want to think of my life as a tragedy. So let’s just put that quote in the circular file….