Another Goodbye

This made me so sad today:

Singer Dan Fogelberg Dies of Cancer at Age 56

A friend introduced me to Dan Fogelberg's music back in 1974.  He was one of two artists I've ever seen in concert multiple times (the other being John Denver--gone ten years, now.) 

Dan Fogelberg was only four years older than I am.  He hailed, as I did, from the cornfield quilted Land of Lincoln.  He sang of love and loss during the years I went through those very things.  He sang about the earth back when we all used to care about it. I feel like we grew up together. 

We never met, but he was part of my youth, part of my history as much as any friend or lover. Of course this is not a personal loss.  But, then again, it is. 

So much of my history has been swallowed up by death lately.

And it's really starting to piss me off... 

Vanity, Thy Name is...Uh, What's Thy Name Again?

Even had it not been for the sad events of the past couple of weeks, this holiday season was destined to be different from the last several.

I just couldn’t consider tearing every room in my house apart and reconstructing the "Christmas Zone" I’ve enjoyed over the last few years. And not really because I don’t have any time to DO the decorating (though I truly don’t...) More because the thought of UNDOING the decorating come mid-January left me absolutely cold.

So…

No five trees in the house; we’ve cut the population to two. And neither of these is in my bedroom. The bedroom will remain holiday neutral this season. No tree, no snow-kitties on the mantel, no candles in the fireplace, no glitter stuck to my face when I wake up.

Nor will the family room get bedecked this year. Hardly seems worth it, since we spend about two hours a week relaxing there anymore.

The living room will harbor one barely over-decorated tree. Easy up, easy down…

Worst of all, one of my favorite holiday indulgences has finally been made redundant by the hands-on nature of living the dream…

Sigh!

Tags: holidays 07

My Mother's Hands

All through preparations for my mom's funeral, I knew that what I needed to do was to give of my talent, from my heart.  An artist would paint, a photographer would snap, a seamstress would sew...and I--needed to write.  Something.  But the words refused to come.

Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday went by...  I understood the imperative, but could not find the inspiration.  The funeral was this morning--Friday.  It was now or never.

No time to fuss, no time to edit and re-arrange and tweak.  And it came, in a rush...

I remember my mother’s hands
Not elegant nor slender
But stout and strong and
always busy

My earliest memories are of those capable hands
Wielding a dust cloth, a dish rag, a scrub brush,
Feeding laundry through the wringer washer
pegging it out on the line to dry
Dipping a spoon into the magic paste
that would become the lumpy dumplings
in our favorite chicken soup

We coveted the gentle stroke
that would calm a fevered temple
And dreaded the near-scalping
when those hands came in contact with
any object surrounding a
shock of hair attached to the backs of our heads
("It’ll only hurt for a second…!)

Those hands, nearly forty years old, were introduced
to the steering wheel of a station wagon in 1961
and carried on a love/hate relationship with that object
for the next thirty years
And in 1966, they traded the dust cloth and mop
for the pencil and the adding machine
The kitchen table for the desk at Woolworth’s--
another love-hate relationship that lasted nearly twenty years.

I remember those hands
fussing with the filmy folds of a veil around my face
taking needle and thread to the great hole in that veil
after I wrapped it around a barberry bush fleeing the rice-throwers
on a chilly October morning in 1976
Those loving hands…those mother’s hands

In retirement, those hands
Clutched a fishing pole or a handful of playing cards
("I’ve got a hand like a foot!!")
Tipped a watering can into one green thing or another
that always responded enthusiastically to her touch
stroked the soft fur of the latest adoptee
or sneaked forbidden bits to furry family members
waiting confidently at her feet under the dining table
Wrapped around a pen, dispatching volumes upon volumes of word puzzles
heavy with the rings and bracelets she loved to pile on
But busy…always busy

I hope now, wherever her spirit is going
they give her hands, as well as wings

Elsie B. 1922-2007

Requiem


Fold thy hands sleeping!
Angels are keeping
     Watch o’er thee now.
See, it is dawning!
Light of the morning
     Falls on thy brow.

White wings are flying!
No more shall dying
     Darken thy day.
Leave thou Death’s portal!
Spirit immortal
     Speed on thy way!

When skies are paling
And clouds are sailing
     Over Earth’s night,
Only in dreaming
Shall thou be seeming
     Lost to our sight.

Dream mists are drifting!
Fingers are lifting
     Curtains of space!
Framed in its splendor
Wistful and tender,
     Smiles thy dear face.

                                      --J. Wilmer Gresham

A Stormy Peace

We saw Mom on Saturday for a few minutes. Spent the rest of the day helping my sisters decompress a little. And then stopped by to see her again Sunday morning. Saturday, she was awake and in distress. Sunday, not so much.

We drove home, through the wind and rain of a nasty Pacific Northwest winter storm, no wiser about what was going to happen with Mom, or when.  It could be hours...days...a week. 

When we got home, we called for news. Mom's condition was rapidly deteriorating. Sister D would spend the night at her bedside.

I would sleep fitfully, waking to hour after hour of howling wind and pelting rain. Remembering that when my Dad died, the weather was almost exactly the same.

Mom died this morning around 7:30 am.

The Long, Slow Pain

In the last six weeks, my mother has been in the hospital; in a nursing home; a day away from going back to her apartment…then back to the hospital, and back to the nursing home. It has been an arduous ordeal.

I can wish that her trials had ended with that first episode back in October. When her heart slowed and stopped, but the paramedics didn’t know enough to let it be. I can say that was her time, and she was cheated out of it. But that’s not really my call to make, is it?

Six weeks ago, Mom was not ready. She was just approaching the steep end of her final decline. She wasn’t tired enough, wasn’t near done fighting.

My sisters weren’t ready, either. Having been charged with her care since my dad’s death, they were so invested in keeping her going, that they didn’t recognize that the time was approaching to let her go.

Now. Now is the time. Six weeks of pain, confusion and fear have pried loose Mom’s vise-like hold on life. Six weeks of trying to alleviate that same pain, confusion and fear have ultimately served to redirect my sisters’ energies from keeping Mom alive at all costs, to keeping her comfortable as she completes her final journey.

So today, we will make the trip 100 miles south. Who knows, she may not even wait for us to get there. But it doesn’t matter. None of the bickering or the sniping, or the estrangements or the hurt feelings, or the bossiness or the passive-aggressive posturing…none of that matters now. My first thought was of these things, and how I didn’t want to deal with them. Not now, my heart argued. Not in my current sleep-deprived, chronically stressed-out condition. I have done my filial duty. I was at my dad’s bedside when he died. Surely that should give me a credible pass on this one. I told my sister we probably wouldn’t be coming. Call me when it’s over.

A few hours later, in a saner moment, I realized that was the wrong choice. You go to the bedside of your dying parent. You put aside all the dread and the stinging memories and the sibling bullshit, and you go. Not to say goodbye…she will not hear. Most certainly not to make some kind of show for anyone else. You go in love. In thanks. In honor of an eternal connection. In appreciation of a life well-lived.

Memories…they are a double-edged sword, are they not?

My Name is Lisa, and I'm a Yule-a-holic

My low expectations for the coming season notwithstanding, the irresistible compulsions are already beginning...

I took the past weekend off for plans that didn’t come to pass. I knew the plans were history by early in the week. I spent a lot of time fantasizing about what I could do with two entire days off in a row.

Go to the beach?

Go shopping?

Take the dog and my camera for a lovely late autumn walk somewhere?

Ummm…not. Weather turned out cold, dark, ugly and wet. Good for sitting at home, curled up in front of the fire with a good book.

Or putting up a Christmas tree…

Tags: Christmas Tree

Gloomy Days

I’m a naturally pensive person. I think a lot; some might say, too much. And my obsessive rumination generally puts me slightly out of phase with other people. It’s an uncomfortable and often lonely place to exist, so my nature is to be somewhat…blue. Seventy-five percent of the time, I put a good face on it, and go forth as if I’m as positive and jolly as the next guy. But my blues are always just below the surface.

Which is what makes Northwest winters difficult. There are so many dismal, cold and drippy days. The weather becomes an extension of my melancholy, rather than a relief from it. The dark of Oregon winters makes me want to drop the happy mask and just…wallow.

Today is precisely that kind of day. It’s cold and damp, and it’s going to be one of those where we’ll never see full daylight. Outside my dining room window, a few little juncoes are dejectedly pecking at waterlogged seeds. Even the birds look soggy and disgruntled. Looking out upon this vignette, it’s hard for me not to think forward to the coming holidays, and contemplate how sad, dark and empty they are likely to be.

With Thanksgiving just over the horizon, and Mom so sick, the first thing that comes to mind is Christmas, 1998. Dad died the second of February, 1999. The 1998 holiday season was a six-week nightmare. Dad was dying, Mom was ill, and my sisters, my nieces and I were at each other’s throats. I’m not sure why, but our normally close-knit and generally amiable family utterly disintegrated during that dark time. It took me, literally, years to get over it. Or not. I’m still not over it, or so I’ve recently discovered.

Yes, things are different now. Mom is desperately ill, but there is not that feeling that she’ll be going before her time…that she might be leaving her life unfinished. That feeling was so strong when Dad died. It magnified the sadness of his passing a hundredfold.

And this time, we know what it’s like to bury a parent. It’s never easy, and you’re never as prepared as you think you are. With Dad, we were utterly blindsided. At least now, we’ve been through it before.

And there’s one other thing we know. It’s a sad and disheartening thing to know, but we know it nonetheless. We know how poisonous we can be to each other. We know the worst we can be, faced with the strain of coming to terms with death…and life. They say forewarned is forearmed, do they not?

Still, I have this trepidation that whatever knowledge we possess, it won’t be enough to keep us from going for the jugular when the stress reaches the boiling point. We don’t seem to be able to help ourselves. Our Pandora’s box was torn open when Dad was dying…and we haven’t yet been able to corral or appease everything that flew out of it those nine years ago.

So my highest wish for this holiday season is…I wish it was spring.

Tags: Holidays

Mom's Journey Goes On...And On

Wednesday morning, I called my sister for the update on Mom. I was thrilled to hear that it looked like Mom was going to recover enough to go back to her apartment. Better news than I had expected in a million years.

That afternoon, my sister called me back. Mom "crashed." She was in bed, barely conscious, too weak to sit in her chair or eat. Nobody knows why.

They took her back to the hospital last night. In an ambulance. I told my sister, "Just don’t let them zap her again." And she said, "Well, with the pacemaker, they shouldn’t need to." Sigh!

And so this card-carrying agnostic stops what she’s doing at odd times during the day, adopts the hundred-mile-stare, and wishes with every fiber of her being for Mom to give in and go on...to whatever there is to go on to. I don’t know why, but I’m convinced there is something, an unimaginable transcendence to the next level, whatever it is… And I can’t help but think it is where our spirits really belong, are in fact straining to go, once we slough off our corporeal baggage.

It breaks my heart to know she’s clinging so hard to…so much less than she could have if she just let go.

But nobody said life was easy.

And neither is death.

Going Down and Getting Up

Fall arrived at the café last month, dropping duffel bags full of problems into our laps. We slid into a dark period of awful sales numbers, missed or retracted opportunities and continued labor crises. The virus that the girls brought through the doors in late August hounded us like a telephone solicitor. We passed it back and forth in various mutations for almost two months. I finally ended up on antibiotics for a strep infection. Everyone was sick, sales were in the toilet, and I personally was so burned out, used up and generally wasted that the light at the end of the tunnel just…went out. When I ended up spending a rare day off running around a Kaiser clinic tracking down treatment for my infected throat, I knew I couldn’t go on like this anymore.
So, in the middle of all this gloom, who should walk up to my front counter and nearly beg for her job back but Flaky Cook? The one who just…stopped coming to work back in June? The drama queen whose combination of general competence and constant personal turmoil made her one of the most frustrating employees I have ever had? Much as she made my life interesting bordering on miserable during her tenure, I knew she was a very available answer to my current dilemma. A capable cook already familiar with our operation who could work morning hours during the week. So I wouldn’t have to be chained to the kitchen for thirteen hours a day. Manna from heaven! I put her back on the payroll.
Despite her promises to do better, I fully expect her to remain flaky and unreliable; and in the end, she’ll probably disappear on me again in a few months. But if I can coax a couple of months of decent work out of her, it will give me time to rejuvenate a little and work on the kinds of things that will keep the doors open—like marketing, menu development, training and working on our décor to provide a more pleasant dining atmosphere. Flaky Cook is in her third week back with us, and I already feel a hundred percent better.
Still, I’ve wondered whether I made the right decision. It was definitely a matter of choosing the devil you know over the devil you don’t know. Fifteen years ago, I never would have even spoken to that kind of employee again, much less rehired her. But if I’ve learned nothing else in the last eighteen months, I’ve learned that times have radically changed when it comes to getting people to work for you. I’ve had to put my impossibly high standards aside and deal with what is.
But if last week was any indication of what can be accomplished when I am rested and released enough to do the things an owner should be doing, I’ll take it. We started out with absolutely dismal sales. October was just destined to be a terrible month for us, I guess, and the last three days of the month trickled away into ignominy. We showed almost a fifty percent drop in sales from Halloween last year. Kind of spoiled what is usually my favorite month of the year…but I wasn’t sorry to close the book on it. However, having Flaky Cook take over for me in the kitchen had given me time to develop a menu and an ad for "Italian Night," the first of which was to take place on November 2. With such a dismal month in the bank, I didn’t have a lot of money to go throwing around on advertising, so I set myself a paltry $100 budget for the ad. This bought me a two-column by five-inch ad in two issues of the local paper.
I spent many hours planning, prepping, designing the menu and generally sweating and fretting. When I got the paper on Thursday, I excitedly leafed through it to find my ad. Damn. It was so small it was almost invisible. I really doubted, then, whether "Italian Night" was going anywhere at all. But I decided to continue on as if it would.
Friday started out as a passably decent business day. We had a lunch rush, which we hadn’t had all week. In fact, on Thursday there was not a soul in the place from about 12:15 until almost 1:30—usually our busiest hour of the day. To say I was disheartened and just plain scared would be putting it mildly… But Friday started out pretty well, so I was in a mood to predict good things for "Italian Night," slated to start at 5:00 pm.
So of course, though we’d had a steady stream of customers in the place all afternoon, at 5:00, we were stone empty. Apparently, "Italian Night" was going to fall flat on its focaccia. I printed off a last few menus, poured myself a glass of wine (my symbol of conceding defeat, since by OLCC rules, I’m not supposed to return to work once I’ve consumed alcohol…) and started up a game of "Spider" on the laptop. I would hang around in case a couple of tables came in and the girls in the kitchen had questions about our new menu items, but it was clearly going to beanother night of defeat and frustration.
About 6:00, a couple of parties came in. Then a couple more. Then more. And more. By 6:30, the dining room was almost full, and we were sending out plate after plate of steaming pasta. Many guests gushed to the girls that they had come in specifically to try out "Eye-talian" Night. Wonder of wonders, it looked like we just might have a winner on our hands after all.
My little barely visible ad had amazing effect. We were, in fact, busy all weekend. The previous Saturday and Sunday, I was absolutely convinced that everyone had forgotten where we were and what we did. This past weekend, they seem to have suddenly remembered. Could my tiny little ad have subliminally reminded them of the great breakfasts they had enjoyed over the summer, even if they weren’t particularly interested in Italian Night? I’m going to choose to believe that’s what happened anyway. And savor this little bit of success as long as I can. Which is until about five minutes ago, when I should have jumped out of bed, because now I’m in danger of being late for work...

Tags: Small business