Top of the List

I’ve been thinking a lot about what I want my life to look like in the next 20 or 30 years. Many of my dearest friends are at least 15 years older than I am, and these women in their mid-70’s are busy, engaged, active, and interesting. They’ve honed their lives down to the most important elements, knowing what it is that they excel at, how they want to spend their time, but also knowing their limits. One of them travels extensively, one still works as the music director of her busy church and finds time to swim and do yoga, another of them founded a community theater group several years after she retired from full time teaching. My mother has a dear friend who has been struggling with depression, a struggle that has manifested itself in a lack of interest in living, an inability to do any of the things she once loved to do. A devout and committed Catholic, she has stopped attending church, stopped all her volunteer activities, and even stopped singing in the choir which she once told me was her “saving grace."

My mother is concerned about her friend, as well she should be. I only half jokingly remarked that  if I were ever to stop reading, writing, and playing music, then my family would know I was near death. But it’s true - when people suddenly give up the things they are passionate about, the very things that have always given them the most pleasure and been the most life-inspiring, then something is very wrong.

I’ve had some experience with depression, which occurred during a time in my life when I was overwhelmed with painful and stressful situations.  Because I am the kind of person I am, I denied my feelings and continued to push through my busy days, never acknowledged the hurt until my body forced me to seek help. With the help of a good therapist and the love and support of my family, I finally put all my energy into getting better. 

But given different life circumstances, I could so easily have been someone like my mother’s friend, who has faced periodic depression her entire adult life.  As a child, I was highly sensitive, overprotected, shy, nervous, timid. I worried about everything. I had nervous tics, like tying my hair in knots and even pulling it out.

Going to school saved me. I had wonderful school experiences, and am so grateful to my elementary school teachers who encouraged me and helped me feel almost normal. I remember them still, 50 years later - Miss Kamm, Miss Strale, Mrs. Heitzner - these women showed me how to use my brain and cultivate my talents. By the time I reached middle school I had more confidence, was proud and sure of my abilities in writing in music, and enjoyed friendships and social activities like any “normal" teenager.

And I have been blessed with so much love - from my parents, my grandparents, aunts and uncles. My husband, who has loved and supported everything I’ve ever wanted to do since I was 17 years old. This kind of unconditional love is such good medicine, even during the darkest days. Not everyone gets that for even a while, certainly not for their whole life.

When I was in therapy some years ago, my therapist suggested I act as if I were happy. While that may seem like a simplistic exercise, it helped me. I made the effort to smile more often. I forced myself to talk to people, to write, to take daily walks. After pretending for a while, the pretense started to feel natural. My emotions started following my behavior. The exercise also forced me to think about what happiness really meant for me, something I had never consciously done before.

One of the things I most appreciate about mid-life is the ability to look both backwards and forwards with the wisdom of experience and self-knowledge. I've learned what makes me happy and I’m (finally!) learning how to balance my needs with the needs of everyone else out there. (Hint: It involves using a tiny two-letter word that heretofore has been absent from my vocabulary.)  I’m becoming cognizant of my limits, physical and mental, and I try and listen to my body. I know I need regular meals and six hours of sleep. I need coffee in the morning, a walk outside every day, and dogs at my feet. I like to sleep in my own bed with a pile of good books on the night table beside me. 

I know my surest path to depression is letting the needs of the outside world overwhelm me and rob me of my daily routines and time at home with the people I love. 

I realize now that I don’t have to apologize for needing these things. My life doesn’t have to look like my friend’s life, or my mother’s life, or my favorite celebrities life.

It only has to look like MINE.

And right now the picture is as nearly perfect as it’s been in a long time. It’s the picture I want to paint and put on a vision board as my goal for the next 20 or 30 years  (well, maybe minus wintry weather we’ve had for the past four months.) I want to carry this vision forward into the next part of my life. I want to be the kind of “old lady” who is eager, interested (and interesting!) and engaged in the world around her, who knows what she wants from her one life and is willing to work to have it.

Because then I won’t be OLD at all.

I’ll just be the best, happiest version of me.

The Lives of the Poets

Lately I’ve been reading and studying about the lives of poets Donald Hall and Jane Kenyon. Frankly, I’m obsessed with them.

It all began with a quote of Hall’s which led me to some of his prose writing, which led me to his poems, which led to more of his prose, which in turn led to Kenyon and her poems…and well, here I am, surrounded by piles of books about two people whom I’ve never met but with whose lives I feel utterly familiar.

This isn’t the first time I’ve become enthralled with the lives of poets. When I was a teenager, it was Emily Dickinson who caught my attention, that brilliant recluse in her white dresses, floating through the woods with tiny scraps of paper drifting behind her. Then in college I developed a macabre fascination with Sylvia Plath, her life, her work, her death, all of it appealing to a morbid streak I’ve never been able to quell. My bookshelves are still testimony to both these obsessions, overflowing with texts by and about these two women.

Is there a purpose to such enchantment, besides my simple curiosity? Are poets and writers my “celebrity” obsession, the way some people fixate on movie stars or sports heroes? Or am I looking for insight into my “teachers,” the people whose work and minds I admire?

I think (or at least I hope) that it’s more the latter. Writers like Hall and Kenyon have a rich inner life which they translate into magical poetic imagery. But their outer lives, their day to day existence, is really much like my own. They loved their home, they protected their solitude, they were happy slaves to their daily routine. They cherished the mundane, yet gave us a body of literature conveying life’s sacredness.

I often write about the extraordinary ordinary, how the seemingly small events of everyday life take on great significance if you look at them with an awesome perspective, the way these poets often do in their verse. “The newspaper, the coffee cup, the dog’s/impatience for his morning walk/These fibers braid the ordinary mystery,” writes Hall in his poem The Coffee Cup. “Ordinary days were best/when we worked over poems in our separate rooms,” he writes in Letters With No Address, after Kenyon’s death. “In the bliss of routine/coffee, love, pond afternoons, poems/we feel we will live/forever…"

Kenyon focuses her bright poet’s eye on the “Luminous Particular," imbuing powerful emotion into a particular  image or event which in turn becomes luminous in importance. “I scrub the floorboards/in the kitchen, repeating/the motions of other women/who have lived in this house./And when I find a long gray hair/floating in the pail/I feel my life added to theirs.”

These days I am living in what Hall would probably describe as one of the best years of my life.  They are the years, he said, that “you remember least because nothing notable happens.” They are not the years of disease or sadness, not even the years of great events or travel. They are the years filled with one ordinary day after another. “The best moments of our lives,” he wrote, “were the days of repeated quiet and work.” Work meaning doing the things they loved - reading, writing, walking their dog, climbing the mountain, eating sandwiches, watching baseball, playing ping pong.

“It might have been otherwise,” Kenyon writes in what is probably her best loved poem (Otherwise) as she lists the things she does on a day she obviously considers one of the best. Getting out of bed on “two strong legs", eating cereal with “sweet milk, a ripe flawless peach,”  taking the dog "uphill to the birch plantings", eating dinner with her mate at “a table with silver candlesticks.”

“But one day, I know,” she concludes, “it will be otherwise.” As of course it was, when just a few months after writing those words she was diagnosed with leukemia and was dead just a year later.

How extraordinary is the best of everyday, especially when seen in the light of what might be otherwise. Even today, when yesterday’s promised hope of spring has dissolved and the sky hangs heavy with clouds and cold icy rain. I am blessed with my warm house, with the companionship of these small dogs who are sentinels at my feet. With tea in a green cup crafted by the hands of a friend. These fibers “braid the ordinary mystery."

The lives of the poets remind us. Their work gives us a way to see it anew.

Because we know otherwise will come.

*April is National Poetry Month. Poetry has always been important in my life. I’ve written more about that here.

Sing-Spiration

Although my musical training and expertise is mainly as an instrumentalist, my years of accompanying choral groups have given me a profound admiration for the craft of singing. Choral music and vocal singing are fulfilling on two levels - my musical ear is satisfied, but so is my writer’s ear. Singing tells a story by setting words to music, and the best choral groups and vocalists convey the depth of this meaning with the nuance of their performance.  Listening to glorious music automatically makes me a happier person. My recent trip to New York was a unique opportunity to hear some of the best male choruses from the midwest and eastern sections of the country. The IMC (Intercollegiate Men’s Chorus) convocation brings together groups of male singers of all ages, who gather to share their love of singing with each other and with their audiences. For the past 100 years, male choruses have joined this collegium to celebrate the inspiring power of song.

I took the opportunity to share more about the experience in this week’s Sunday Salon at All Things Girl magazine.

No Place Like It

We spent last weekend traveling in New York and New Jersey with other members of my husband’s choral group as they performed in a convocation of choruses from around the east  and midwest. After a very full weekend of singing, socializing, and sight-seeing, we traveled home on my birthday early Sunday morning. Contrary to what you might think after my last post in which I so fondly reminisced about birthday parties of my youth, I no longer care much about celebrating my birthday. Perhaps I got it all out of my system when I was younger. Now, I prefer the kind of understated recognition my son enjoyed in his childhood - a quiet day at home, some family time, maybe a nice dinner at a favorite restaurant. So I happily boarded the plane at 9:00 a.m., knowing I’d be home in time for lunch and would have the remainder of the day to myself.

It probably won’t surprise my readers if I say there is literally no other place on earth I’d rather be than in my home. It’s my sanctuary, my happy place, my salvation, all contained within the space of four walls. As we wandered shivering through the noisy, crowded, dirty streets of New York, wending our way amidst scaffolding, steering clear of the mass of bodies pushing headlong into the wind toward office, home, subway, train, my heart was beating a rapid tattoo - get home, get home, get home, it battered against my chest. I imagine my face wore the panicked expression you see on the eyes of a lost dog anxiously running down an unfamiliar street. Where is my house? Where are my people? Where is my home?

Sometimes I feel as if I need to apologize for loving home so much, for my desire to be here rather than traipsing around the world. For most of my generation, traveling is listed at the top of their ubiquitous bucket lists. There is a sensation that in order to be smart, interesting, and informed, one must be a traveler, must yearn to see and experience foreign lands. If that need doesn’t exist for me, am I therefore provincial, small-minded, and dull? If I don’t force myself out into new and different places, will my intellect atrophy like the sinew of a paraplegic confined to a wheelchair?

My love of home is long-standing and probably inbred. My mother despises travel - her mantra being “don’t take me anywhere unless I can get home to sleep in my own bed.” My grandmother and aunt were like-minded, and when I was younger I determined to be different. I scoffed at their attitudes, which I felt were based on fear and provincialism. Jim and I did some traveling, and I congratulated myself for (eventually!) learning to fly without fear, wander around in unfamiliar cities, even spend three weeks criss-crossing the United Kingdom.

But no matter where I am, every night at dark I am struck with an unassailable bout of homesickness, a heart-wrenching longing for my comfortable chair, a hot bath in my own tub, my bed, pillow, and book to lull me to sleep. With each passing year, it becomes more difficult to over this feeling, to find an acceptable balance between the longing for home and the potential benefit of having new experiences.

Right after my son’s birth, he developed severe jaundice and was having a terribly difficult time nursing. His healthy eight pound birthweight quickly dropped to six and half pounds. The head of pediatrics was called in, and after a five minute consultation diagnosed “failure to thrive.” The doctors wanted to send me home and keep Brian in the hospital. I protested, and because this was 34 years ago and insurance companies did not have the same stranglehold on medical treatment they have today, I was allowed to remain in the hospital in an attempt to maintain nursing. Finally, after a week of being in a hospital room with two other women, a week of aching to go home with my baby, I convinced the doctor to discharge us, even though Brian still hadn’t regained much of his birthweight.

“It will all be better when we get home,” I promised him. I’m upset, I can’t eat, I’m not making any milk. I just need to go home."

When we got home that day, my mother and grandmother had been at our house all day, making fried chicken and buttermilk biscuits, macaroni-and-cheese and cherry pies - all those fat-filled Southern comfort foods that spell H-O-M-E. Within a day or two, the baby was nursing like a champ. Within two weeks, he had gained three pounds. Home worked its magic on both of us.

Last Sunday as our plane headed west toward Michigan I felt myself becoming more and more energized with each passing mile. Despite only three hours of fitful sleep the night before, I was wide awake and excited. Although Jim crashed on the sofa exhausted and travel weary, I arrived home with abundant energy, spent the day putting everything back in order, catching up on e-mails, planning for the week ahead, cooking dinner, enjoying a movie on television. I reveled in a hot bath in my garden tub, the warm blankets on my bed, my favorite fluffy pillow, and a book.

These days it seems that  home calls to me as it never has before. Perhaps it’s because I have become so enamored of this new house, this new neighborhood, because I sigh with pure delight each time I walk in the door and know this beautiful place is my home. Perhaps it’s because I feel a need to be closer than ever to my mother, who becomes more frail with each passing day and depends on the security of my nearby presence. Perhaps it’s because I need the sense of constancy and permanence offered in  daily routines, which in some ways have taken on the essence of sacred rituals. Morning coffee. Walks. Reading and writing. Bath, books, bed.

“There is nothing like staying at home for real comfort,” Jane Austen wrote. Whatever the reason, I will no longer apologize for my lack of interest in traveling or for my desire to be home. For me at this point in my life, there is no place like it.

Celebrations

Birthdays are my favorite of all holiday celebrations. I love everything about them (well, maybe not so much the getting older part). I love having a special day that is just about me, a day that celebrates my existence. I love hearing my mother’s version of the night I was born, a story that takes on almost religious significance in family history.  I love remembering some of the ways I’ve celebrated all my birthdays over these almost six decades. When I was a little girl, my mother gave me not only one but two elaborate birthday parties every year. One was a family party,  for the multitude of cousins, including aunts and uncles, who lived near us. The other was for my neighborhood and school friends, all my hand-picked favorites. The parties were always at our house, and I have wonderful memories of picking out colored streamers with coordinating decorative paper plates, cups, napkins, and candles. I always had a new dress to wear, which meant a shopping trip the week before the big day. There would be fresh sandwiches (usually turkey and ham salads), home baked chocolate layer cake, and neopolitan ice cream. All my favorites.

They were grand and gala affairs, these birthday parties. And though I swear on a stack of Bibles that I am introvert through and through, I still recall being giddy with excitement about being the center of attention during these events.

When my son was little, we had a combination friend/family party for his first and second birthdays. By this time, most of my cousins had grown up, many had moved away. Some of the aunts and uncles were retired to Florida or California. Because neither Jim nor I have any siblings, there wasn’t much in the way of family to celebrate. Brian’s birthday celebrations became small family affairs, or maybe a sleep-over with one special friend.

When Brian was in second grade, he was in a particularly nice classroom with several little boys he enjoyed playing with. I had been feeling guilty about our lackluster birthday festivities, and I suggested we have a big birthday party and invite all the boys in his class. He agreed, so we set about planning how to fit 9 or 10 little boys in our small house. I moved furniture out of the way, set up card tables in the living room, decorated with streamers. I can’t recall if we had a “theme,” but if we did it was probably either cars or Star Trek.

On the appointed day, the boys descended. There was no worry about trying to fit them into the house. They simply took over every available inch of space. It was pretty wild and rambunctious, at least by our quiet standard of living. Cake and ice cream were consumed, games were played, toys were opened and wrapping paper tossed with wild abandon. It was a a typical boyish birthday party.

After it was over and the last guest had been ushered out the door, Brian turned to me and said, “Don’t ever do that to me again.”  Turns out what I thought would be a fun and celebratory event for him was more akin to spending the afternoon in the seventh circle of hell.

One of the hardest lessons we learn as parents is that our children are not us. As a mother, I had identified so closely with my son that I assumed he would love the same things I loved. It’s hard to accept that our children don’t alway share our feelings or reactions or preferences. It’s a lesson we keep learning, every single day.

Today is my son’s birthday. He’s having a quiet day with his wife and son, going out for lunch, going shopping, maybe playing some video games. There is birthday cake at home for later, and presents and cards waiting to open. While some young men in their 30’s would probably enjoy a day hanging out with a group of friends, maybe going to a game, drinking some beer, I’m pretty sure Brian’s plans for today will suit him a lot better.

But there is one feeling I’m quite sure that Brian and I share: The day our sons were born was the best day of our lives.

Happy birthday to my wonderful son. May this new year of your life be filled with happiness!