The Comfy Pants

A few years ago, a guy I was dating introduced me to the awesomeness and bliss that is flannel lounge pants! We always referred to them as our "Comfy Pants."

There is nothing like coming home after a long day--especially if it's cold and miserable out--and slipping into something soft and loose and cozy. And perhaps cuddling up on the couch to watch a good movie. Flannel pants are the one article of clothing that makes you want to release a long, contented exhale.

To be honest, I haven't worn or even thought about comfy pants in a long, long time. We've had one of the hottest summers on record here in Ohio...but it's beginning to cool off. We are getting sneak previews of autumn. Tonight the low will be 48!!! That is lower than it's been since the month of April. I may have to break out the lounge pants...and a cup of hot chocolate.

Sometimes...the greatest pleasures in life are that simple.

Love Bombing

Hey, wanna try something really cool?

I've been doing something I call "love bombing" for the last decade of my life, and not only is it amusing and interesting (in a weird, science-project kind of way) but it makes me feel good, and more connected to my fellow human beings at times when there is the greatest tendency for dis-connect.

You can do it just about anywhere you go, while out in public. Grocery stores are a good start. Ever notice how people sort of ram around with their carts, studying their lists, searching the overhead aisle signs, looking to see where they need to go and -- most likely doing it all in a hurry? How often do you ever really make eye contact with people you pass in the supermarket? So what I do is, I not only meet their gaze, but I smile. Not a brief nod or up-turning of the corners of the mouth, but a full-on smile that you'd give your best friend.

The reactions you get are amazing. They range from a look of surprise ("WTF? Did someone actually just smile at me? Is she insane or something?) to a shy, uncertain returned smile, to a delighted "Hey, right back at ya!" smile. There are the occasional people who look away and pretend they didn't see, or perhaps they thought your smile wasn't directed at them, but they are rare.

The Supermarket Love Bomb has the biggest impact when your cart and someone else's cart meet at a crossroads, or you both swing dangerously around the corner of an aisle toward each other...in which case I always stop dead, lean forward engagingly, and flash the smile. The oncoming person--who is already stressing because he isn't sure if you're going to be rude and barge past him or be snippy about who should get right-of-way, or crash into her child behind the wheel of those race-car grocery carts--is suddenly disarmed. She returns the biggest, brightest smile because you just completely gave her the green light, no questions asked.

After all this, if you're really looking for a warm fuzzy perk - watch how some of these people that you bomb walk away still smiling. For some, you could very well have been the nicest person they've seen all day.

Another favorite place of mine, to drop the love bomb, is at intersections.

This is a great way to keep your mind off how boring red lights are, and to keep from growing huffy and impatient. When you are sitting at a red light, in a lane closest to opposing traffic, watch people who are either turning left or right into the lane that will pass right by you. If they are really good drivers, their eyes will stay glued to the road. But if they are the sort of people who eye the driver sitting at the corner while they turn, flash the best-friend smile at them. I almost always giggle because the main reaction is a double-take. Especially if it's a guy. ("Huh? Did she...did she just smile at me? Do we know her or something?") But I can tell, whoever it is, that they were completely surprised and delighted to get a big smile from a stranger...especially when their face morphs from a tense scowl to a slow grin.

Moving a few facial muscles, people. It's that easy. And you've made someone's day.

Try it out - it just might make YOUR day, too.

More Curve Balls (Finding re-employment when everything WAS set for life)

I am in yet another life transition. Once again, I find myself looking for a new job.

In the last eleven years, I have changed careers three times. My life is beginning to feel like the game Musical Chairs. I am not an indecisive person, nor do I get bored with things easily. Life just keeps throwing me one curve ball after another. Perhaps I should've been a baseball player.

I'm sure many people know how this feels, having lost their jobs or been displaced, somehow, due to the struggling economy. Just when you think things are set for life, and you'll never have to worry again...BAM! Sudden and unexpected change boots you right out of that comfort zone.

How ironic that a year and a half ago, I wrote this about my massage therapy career:

Touching Lives

I ruminate a lot, while doing my work as a massage therapist…

I hold the senior citizen’s hands and think how they have done days and weeks and months and years of work in their lifetime.

I hold the surgeon’s hands that will go on to do countless surgeries that will save hundreds of lives.

I work on the eleven-year-old gymnast’s muscles that might go on to win Olympic gold in 2012.

I carefully work around the baby that will be born in seven months, wondering who he or she is, and if they feel the affects of Mom’s massage.

Keeping emotion at bay, I work on a weary body slowly losing its function to a terminal illness—and savor the moments that he is still alive and breathing.

I spend a little extra time on the nurse’s or teacher’s feet that have been standing for the last twelve hours.

I am extra gentle with the eighty-six year-old body in which I lived for nine months.

I watch a face full of tension melt into unconscious tranquility.

I hear that familiar sigh, ten minutes into a massage, when someone surrenders all the cerebral turmoil they’ve been carrying in their brain and body all day.

I feel the subtle shift of joints, tendons, or knotted muscles sliding back into place.

I watch blood return underneath the skin, replacing a lifeless palor.

I watch them leave, renewed and rejuvenated.

I really do love my job

I never thought I'd be sifting through the "needle in a haystack" job sites online, dressing up in corporate attire, and sitting in job interviews where I had to say how proficient I was at Microsoft Excel, or explain in three different ways what type of educational writing I did. But a tendon injury forced me out of my massage career, and I had to regroup and come up with yet another survival plan. Luckily, I have skills to fall back on, such as copy writing, editing, and a host of general office management skills gleaned from my 25 years of professional experience.

These are the things that keep life "interesting," I suppose. The things that make us tougher and more resourceful. Sure, it's terrifying when the savings you're living off until you find work start dwindling, and a little awkward when you meet your friends at the pub and order iced tea (politely claiming that it's because you're trying to cut back on alcohol for your marathon training) instead of a martini.

But we persevere. Because that's all we can do.

My sister pointed out that some people have it far worse...the single parents who are also looking for work and trying to figure out how to care for their small children in the process. The people who don't have a place to live, while looking for new work, and staying in uncomfortable places until they can afford food and shelter again. In other words, I could be living in a VAN! Down by the RIVER!

So - for all those who have been thrown curve balls - take heart. Everything happens for a reason, and we may find ourselves in another situation that is far better than anything we ever imagined. Perhaps there is "work" we are meant to do, on a deeper level, disguised as a life disruption. Perhaps these changes will lead to people, places, and events that will change the course of our whole life for the better. The possibilities are endless.

May good fortune and unlimited prosperity be ours - very soon.


Namaste.

Reflections at a Waterpark

This piece was originally written in the summer of 2002, while I was attending school for massage therapy. With its summer theme, I thought I'd insert it here in 2010. Its message is still encouraging to me, eight years later.

I have a penchant for combining either work (writing) or study with people-watching in public places. Today’s venue is the local suburban water park where I like to relax in the sun from time to time.

After fifteen grueling minutes of studying the origins and insertion points of muscles in the human body, I am easily distracted by a lifeguard across the basin pool.His hair is blonde and unkempt like Rod Stewart’s, his sunglasses are tapered like Bono’s, and his nature is goofily overzealous.It is one o’clock and just up the hill, the bigger pool by the rec center is opening for the day.

“Rod” stands up, raises his arms all Evita Peron-like and bellows, “The big pool is open, everyone!  It’s open!”  Then he sweeps his arms in the direction of the hill, as if to shepherd his adoring ten and eleven-year-old followers.  Some start off toward the hill, others just stare up at his exuberance, dumbfounded.  He is not the normal lifeguard they are used to, who sits in hawk like stillness with the exception of a whistle twirl every once in awhile to let people know he’s alive.  Rod the lifeguard watches the ones who leave and nods, satisfied.  “Yes!  Go!  Big pool!  All right!”

Then Rod decides he likes this standing position of power and stays there, surveying the basin pool before him, the sidewalk behind him and the other lifeguards in the chairs across from him.  He tries to catch the eye of one, waving at her.  When she finally sees him, he points to the huge black cloud just beginning to occlude the sun.  He hugs his arms around his chest and yells, “Brrr!  Cold!”  The female lifeguard simply nods and looks elsewhere.  Rod is not daunted by this blow-off.  In fact, he begins to jive and dance and “stir the pot” in his standing position, most likely to a steady, driving tune that plays in his head.  Maybe his whole lifeguard world is like one big rock video to him.  Hey, at least he’s happy.

I go back to my anatomy textbook.  Now it is time to conquer a large, two-page list of muscle types.  Somehow, the steady noise of rippling water, flags flapping in the breeze, voices of children, and an occasional “GO!” from the lifeguard directing traffic on top the waterslide, becomes a pleasant din that forces my concentration more than if I’d been sitting home in a quiet living room.

“Uh-oh, she’s studyin’,” says a rough, low voice.  I look up and my deck chair neighbor is back from her smoke break with her two daughters.  She has a deep tan, spunky short hair and the mannerism of a truck stop waitress, but she’s friendly as she points to my textbook and says, “Yep. Been there, done that.  It’s tough.  I’ll bet you thought, ‘oh no’ when we got here with our loud little girls!”

I smile and explain that sometimes noisy environments actually improve my studying and retention, and she says she can relate because she was the same way when she studied to be a personal trainer.

On my left is a sixty-something grandma, looking very classy in her dark swimsuit with a gold ringed sash tied in front.  She has brought her two grandsons to the pool for an afternoon of fun in the sun.  We talk about the weather and the pool and swimming…and she admits, patting her middle, that she really should be doing more of it, because she needs to lose twenty pounds.

“When I retired,” she says, “I retired from everything…including exercise!”  I told her I thought she looked pretty darn good for a grandma.

It’s amazing how women who hang out for about five minutes or so can form an instant sisterhood, whether it be deck chair neighbors, standing side by side in a restroom lounge, or next to each other in a grocery check-out line.

I lean back and turn my face to the sun—and yes, I have remembered to use sunscreen.  I begin to reflect on my life, at present.  What if the me of this moment could time travel back to the me of six months ago, curled up and crying and hollow?  If I told her that she would be lying in the warmth of the sun again, happy and well…on the brink of a new career and enjoying new love…would it have given her hope? Would it have dispersed the dark clouds around her that felt like they would never go away? The twists and turns of life never cease to amaze me.

“Goooo!” the lifeguard cries again, like a cosmic reminder to just keep moving, one day at a time.

When I think about it, what else can we do?

Goooooo!

An Ongoing Love Affair

(Written April, 2010)

To many, the ocean is stunning, captivating, and alluring. To someone who grew up in Ohio, it is all that times a thousand.

I was first introduced to the sea at the tender age of five and a half, on a family vacation to Rehoboth Beach, Delaware. (I know, Delawhere?? But it was one of my family’s favorite vacation destinations since long before I was born) I can still remember rushing into the surf with my trusty Styrofoam inner tube to keep me afloat, and not stopping until I had become “one” with the waves. I can also remember my mother’s frantic voice yelling (to the collective bunch of siblings swimming around me), “Watch her! Don’t let her go out too far!”

It was the beginning of a lifelong love affair for me.

In eighth grade, my mother pulled me out of school for two weeks (oh, I’ll bet my teachers loved her) in the dead of winter to whisk me away to Delray Beach, Florida - for a visit with my Italian grandmother. It was then that I learned the absolute bliss of an “ocean respite.” My teenage hormones were making me crazy, math homework was making me cry, and winter time was delivering its cruel, icy bitch-slap for the third month in a row…and it was definitely time to escape. It was time to let the soothing lullaby of the surf calm my every nerve…the healing salt-filled waters cleanse all the toxins from my muscles…and to let the sun replenish my serotonin that would then tell my body, “Things aren’t so bad…in fact, you feel happeeeee…”

Then, when I thought it couldn’t get any better….I went to San Diego (to visit a brother) and met The Pacific. Oh my God. All the usual beauty of the ocean, plus a perpetually sunny and dry climate. It was the summer of 1982, and I spent an entire month with the Pacific. I was sad to have to leave it, but it told me, “Don’t worry. When you’re old enough, we’re going to live together one day.” It kept its promise.

In the next two decades, I had a series of summer flings with the ocean. There was Myrtle Beach the summer after I graduated from high school. The North Sea, the Irish Sea, and the English Riviera - when I did a tour of the UK in 1987. In the 90s I made a trip to coastal North Carolina at Holden Beach, and experienced the rugged and wild coast of Maine on a brief trip to New England. In 2000, I visited the ancient city of Venice—a place surrounded by the sea, and its waters running through as street canals.

In 2001, I was a hardworking school teacher who desperately needed some rest and relaxation far, far away. I’d just read Gift From the Sea by Anne Morrow Lindbergh, and was inspired to make an ocean getaway for my spring break. A dear friend told me about a private place on the Gulf coast of Alabama, and it was one of the most deliciously blissful and healing experiences I’d ever had on a solo journey. The Gulf has its own charms – powdery-white beaches so clean the sand actually squeaks beneath your feet when you walk across it. Dunes and sea oats, giving the beach a soft and exotic feel…and loads of varied shells strewn across the sand for one’s exploratory delight. I returned rejuvenated and ready to finish out the school year.

In 2004 I visited California once again, this time taking Highway 1 up the winding, dramatic coast through Big Sur. The “beauty overload” was so great, that I decided it was high time I lived by the sea.

For two and a half blessed years, I lived in the coastal town of Santa Barbara. It was life-changing. The ocean has an energetic power about it that—when in its presence long enough—can restore balance, self-empowerment, serenity, and hope to one’s life. I returned to Ohio a much different (and better) person than when I’d left. The withdrawal from the ocean felt as grueling and physically painful as a breakup, or even as if I’d lost a part of my body, but what I learned is that I can always draw from its power, no matter where in the world I am.

And now, here I am again at the Gulf Coast of Alabama – at that same private resort. This time around, I was in dire need of a respite from a series of trying events leading back to the death of my brother in October. I am in a transitory phase of life, trying to find new employment in an old career field (since my current one is beginning to take a dangerous toll on my body). So much to think about, so much to do. I am faithful that it will all come together exactly as it’s supposed to, at just the right time. So as I walk this beach once again and feel the healing power of the ocean wash across me in the driving sea winds, I ponder what will come next. I welcome it with open arms. I trust that it’s all in Divine right order. I’m a little excited imagining how it can only get better and better. But more than anything, my heart just overflows with gratitude getting to be here in this little paradise – existing only in the present moment.

Flowers For Algernon - an Aspect of Old Age

(Written December, 2007)

It's one thing to watch our parents get to the age when their bodies become more frail, and they begin to move a lot more slowly, often taking our arm for support or a cane or a walker. But it's another thing entirely to watch as their once-sharp minds begin to fail them, and they're still together enough to know it's happening.

It reminds me of Flowers For Algernon, the famous novel that we probably all had to read at some point in our school curriculum growing up.

Many senior citizens are lucky to never reach this point. Others have to spend the final years of their lives reverting to a childlike mental state, where life is like one long movie in which you can never quite follow the plot, and it can be heartbreaking for them and everyone.

Mom: I feel like I can't even function in society anymore, honey. My brain just doesn't work right.

Me: *gulping down the lump in my throat* Well, you're not alone, Mom. It's happening to many others your age. And I guess all those pregnancies paid off, huh? We're all here to help you get through it.

I'm finding that it's helpful to remember two things: the things our parents do and say aren't personal, and certainly not intentional. The other thing that helps is to read and re-read a narrative called A Parent's Wish that came to me in a family email.

(If you want to watch the long PowerPoint version of it, with Josh Groban's You Raise Me Up making it ten times more heartrending...it's at this website)

A Parent's Wish

On the day when you see us old, weak and weary…have patience and try to understand us

If we get dirty when eating, if we can not dress on our own…please bear with us and remember the times we spent feeding you and dressing you up.

If, when we speak to you, we repeat the same things over and over again…do not interrupt us. Listen to us. When you were small, we had to read you the same story a thousand and one times until you fell asleep

When we do not want to have a shower, do not shame or scold us, but remember when we had to chase you with your thousand excuses to get you to the bath?

When you see our ignorance of new technologies, help us navigate our way through those worldwide webs
We taught you how to do so many things…to eat the right foods, to dress appropriately, to fight for your rights…

When at some moments if we lose our memory or the thread of some conversation, let us have the necessary time to remember. And if we cannot, don’t become nervous…as the most important thing is not our conversation but surely to be with you and to have you listening to us.

(This is my own that I'd like to add: When we are impossibly stubborn and refuse to cooperate and sometimes say or do nonsensical and irrational things...please forgive us and know that it's our loss of inhibition and brain malfunctioning....and remember when we put up with all your impossible tantrums when you were a toddler)

If ever we do not feel like eating, do not force us. We know well when we need to and when not to eat.

When our tired legs give way and do not allow us to walk without a cane, lend us your hand. The same way we did when you tried your first faltering steps.

And when some day we say to you that we do not want to live anymore, that we want to die, do not get angry. Some day you will understand.

Try to understand that our age is not just lived but survived

Some day you will realize that, despite our mistakes, we always wanted the best for you. And we tried to prepare the way for you.

You must not feel sad, angry or ashamed for having us near you. Instead, try to understand us and help us like we did when you were young.

Help us to walk…help us to live the rest of our life with love and dignity. We will pay you with a smile and by the immense love we have always had for you in our hearts.

We love you, child.

Mom and Dad

When times get especially challenging living close to my mother again, it helps to remember all of this. Sometimes it's a little harder to comprehend, when ADULTS begin to act like children. One's brain says, "This does not compute! They're adults. At least you can say that kids don't know better."

But this is the nature of old age, and I'm finding that there's an art to dealing with it. A healthy mix of acceptance, patience, letting other family members step up, taking the necessary breaks for my own wellbeing, and asking for a little grace from my Higher Power. One day at a time.

It's payback time, for the years and years of care I was given. And damn it, that feels rewarding--no matter what the cost.

Here's to all of us as we help usher parents and other loved ones to the end of their lives..


Namaste

Summer…Back in the Day

(Written June, 2007)


As I sat writing on the outdoor deck of the Big Sur River Inn last evening, my senses were bombarded with all the sights, sounds and smells of summertime. The smoke of barbecue grills, chlorine swimming pools, suntan oil (or sunscreen, now days), freshly cut lawn, sun shining through leaves, and sun baked woods.

It took me back to the endless summer-times of childhood. And they were endless...all you did was wake up, play all day, take eating breaks, and play some more until your mom called you in at sundown.

I was fortunate enough to have my best friends right next door, and we would build forts in the woods by our house. We would climb to the dangerously high tree house in the back field (that older kids had already built for everyone to enjoy). We would round up all the neighborhood gang for a knock-down-drag-out kickball game in Brad's backyard--using the basement stoop as first base, the elm tree as second, the woodpile as third and a worn patch of dirt as home plate (I'm sure Brad's parents hated us for that).

Oh, and slip-n-slides!!! Pure, unadulterated aquatic fun on the hottest and stickiest of days!

When I was very little, my female friends and I would remodel the base of a towering oak into a "fairy home" in case they wanted to move in. The large tree roots provided separation between rooms. We made them tables of bark, with acorn tip plates and bowls, and we made sure there were plenty of moss blankets on their beds to keep them warm at night.

Another hallmark of summer, growing up in the Midwest, was lightning bugs! After the first couple of foolish tries at holding them captive in our bare hands all evening (and the subsequent twenty washings to get that horrible chemical smell off), we learned to use an old peanut butter jar with holes in the top...and as always, we let them go when we were done admiring their collective effort at being our lantern.

And finally, the sound of crickets with their lullaby chorus completed another summer day. (Robbie Robertson and the Red Road Ensemble have a track called “Twisted Hair,” with a slowed-down recording of crickets behind an opera singer, and it really does sound like a chorus!).

These are wonderful summer memories to have in my collection, and I'm sure many of you share similar ones from your childhood.

Sometimes it's hard to remember when life was that simple and summers were indeed timeless.