Days of "D" Light

It’s taking the final wash off the clothes-line, folding, and putting it away that tells me I’ve arrived back home. That, and shaking out my purse to remove the cracker crumbs and playground sand that are part of the territory while caring for an active, creative, growing and hungry four year old granddaughter for a couple of weeks. I was more than a bit wistful turning the bag upside down this morning, and I smiled with pleasure - remembering where we’d been during the time her mama was in training 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. for nine days. She’s resuming teaching second grade at the private school where she taught several years ago. Little Miss D will attend the pre-school on the same campus! That’s an offer they can’t refuse!

Mama has thought of several things we may enjoy doing in her absence. There’s a long list. She’s also included coupons for entrance into some of the local museums, amusement parks, and Oakland Zoo, her library card and the hair-cutter's card that tracks each cut, so  you get a free one after ten at regular price.

D and I enjoy putting an “X” by each item on the list that we’ve accomplished.

Day One: Tuesday

D has no interest in going ANYwhere, so we stay IN the house and yard today to get reacquainted and accustomed to one another’s rhythms and just BE with the big change of not having mom from 6 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. Stories I tell her include one that’s a work in progress about “Miss D and the Black Berry Wind,” and many repetitions of her favorite poems: “Wynken and Blynken and Nod,” “The Owl and the Pussycat,” and “How Do You Like to Go Up In a Swing?,” while we form clay into a “flower fairy” who may be the character responsible for that magical black berry wind blowing us about in the first story... we’ll see how that one comes out.

Day Two: Wednesday

Children’s Fairyland, in Oakland’s Lake Merit district, is one of Miss D’s favorite places. We celebrated her birthday there in June, and mom and dad each have a “life-time-membership” card surgically implanted in their forearms, (joke) which allows entrance any day. D and I spend about four hours there - climbing on structures, riding trains and carousels - and we love every minute... from seeing three friends of hers - quite by chance, and meeting new friends, to camping out in the Alice In Wonderland Library to read several delightful books as late afternoon turns to early evening. We talk about all the different parenting styles we see during our day. I remember, but don’t mention what my husband calls “The Five-O’Clock-Disneyland Slap.” That’s the sound you hear throughout the famed and expensive amusement park every afternoon about five p.m. -when mom & dad’s patience has run out, and the realization hits that so has the bank account, and “junior” still wants MORE, MORE, and still MORE, and is getting increasingly vocal and obnoxious about the wants, while all family members are tired, hungry, and over-stimulated. Communication between D and me is clear and a treasure to guard. I will not take these things for granted. We get to see the marionette show of “A Mid-Summer Night’s Dream.” Hokey Dokey Donkey and Puck are priceless.

Day Three: Thursday

After retrieving Miss D from her dad’s house, I drive us to the top of a hill where I picked black berries three years ago. This is the right time of year for them to be ripe again. We find scant few. A kindly octogenarian, who lives across the street from the berry bushes, sees my “Camp Ronald McDonald” license frame, and says, “MY name is Ronald McDonald!” He tells us of the recent “hack-back” someone performed on the once glorious stand of black berries. He tells us his plum trees are prolific this season, and offers us a giant tub from which to pick out several to take home. With that generous offer and a tour of his urban mini-farm, we smile all the way home - despite finding only a handful of edible black berries. 

In the afternoon, we make brownies which we think are for her friends and their mama, who are coming for dinner, but which D’s mom thinks are for the Story-Slam (story-telling party) on Saturday night! Mom is surprised when she gets home and sees the brownies being gobbled by appreciative eaters! D and I feel a little like Amelia Bedelia who does everything on the list... but maybe not the way the list-maker intended the task to be done! (I make another batch for the Saturday night gig before leaving early Saturday morning for Sonoma to visit my high school buddy where she’s recently moved for a job.)  I hear that Mama and D have a good snuggle-filled day.

Days Four, Five and Six:

A flurry of activity - including Gymnastics Camp on Friday, school-clothes buying spree at Thrift Town for all three of us on Sunday, park play-dates with friends, library, grocery shopping, hair-cut, lunch at Play Cafe, one breakfast in bed, one breakfast out in Berkeley, and visits with Gran’Pun who drove up to spend a few days. We look at two open houses and dream about possible living situations closer to D than 400 miles away. 

Auntie Sid comes up from SLO for an all girls slumber party. After saying ‘Bye 'Bye to Gran’Pun, we set out to meet Mama at a big mall for dinner. There are new friends to make and a lot of energy to burn at the kid-space indoor playground. Auntie Sid and I visit while marveling at D’s leadership skills. Within the space of ten minutes, she has made friends with two girls her age and has them emulating her - following an imaginary map to some imaginary treasure. 

Final Day: Another Friday:

We drive the distance to the new school to see the campus and both new classrooms - D’s and Mama’s. This is D’s second visit to the school. We eat lunch at Orientation. D’s dad meets us there - to hear about holidays, snacks, uniforms, and pick-up & drop-off procedures for the coming year.

D, her mama and I bring salad, a third batch of brownies and some yummy raspberries to a pot-luck dinner where mom gets to relax and celebrate having got through one of the toughest nine days in memory. It’s HARD to be separated from one you love so much for soooo many hours for so many days on end!

Saturday morning, my last day in Oakland this trip, finds younger mom and daughter refreshed after TEN hours of un-interrupted and well-deserved sleep!

I have an uneventful and sing-songy drive home. Tears of joy glisten on my sun-washed cheeks. Anticipatory dread that it will be weeks before I see them again knots my stomach. A realtor and I have a date to meet when I go up to work in Burlingame mid September - just to look at possible areas to rent for a while before making any moving commitments.

Thus begins the clean-out and down-sizing saga we’ve long been talking about. It starts with laundry and emptying the purse of crackers and sand... so I know I’m home... or AM I?

Florence, Would You Like to Dance?

Saturday night, our older daughter hosted a story slam in Oakland. A good dozen storytellers gathered for food, drink and nourishing stories.

The topic was "Helping." You might read that "Helping" - as in FOOD, or as in ASSISTANCE.

I took a day off, mid-way through a twelve day stint at helping out here in Oakland with my amazing four year old granddaughter, to visit a friend in Sonoma on Saturday. During the hour drive up and another hour back, I thought about helping.

Physical helping, mental/emotional helping, and spiritual helping... not so much into helpings of food.

It struck me that the third category was the story that wanted to be told.

Here is the link to hearing it. You may need to turn your volume up full blast. Evidently, I need help in projecting!

http://vimeo.com/72629418#signin

If it asks for a password, it is grammy

The song, "Agatha Fry" is from the 1970's album, "Free to Be You and Me" by Marlo Thomas and friends. You hear my daughter and her beau singing along with me towards the end.

Lumpy, Bumpy, Down-In-the-Dumpy

I love my dermatologist.

Like Smoky the Bear, Dr. Rubinstein can differentiate trouble spots from benign dots and reassure me that the lumpy-bumpy-down-in-the-dumpy spots that dot my arms and legs are just part and parcel of the aging process. 

Recently, my face was peeling - a not so appealing sight every morning. On my routine twice yearly check-up, Dr. R said, “It’s common seborrhea... you’re having a second chance at teen-age angst! Just use a little Head & Shoulders on those peely places. You’ll see a difference right away.” Sure enough, I did!

Now, I want a qualified, down-to-earth health practitioner to help with the residue of whip-lash I encountered a couple of years ago, when a gal rear-ended and totaled my car.

Can Dr. Rubinstein please clone himself and have the clone switch specialties?

Maybe, if I put some Head & Shoulders on my neck & shoulders, that’ll do the trick?

Curve Balls

In some darkened field, late at night while we sleep, Life is out there winding up to throw curve balls. Some have landed close to home. Some of those curve balls are hitting and hurting dear friends, family members and clients.

If you find the field, will you please reason with Life for me, and tell it we’ve had quite enough of the curve ball routines, and we request only easy walks for the next little while? Maybe even let us steal some bases and score home runs?

Thank you sincerely.

Meanwhile, in the wake of curve balls, all we can do is love ‘em up - those whom we hold dear to our hearts - while they’re still here.

Got a call today from a friend’s friend whose nephew has some rare sarcastic sarcoma-something-or-other. I told her, I’m not a doctor, I’m not a nutritionist, but I’d be happy to listen to his mama and encourage her to find ways to love him up in the best way she can muster that makes sense to her right now. 

The doctors want him to take in as many calories as he can - even empty calories. All the mamas I know want to be sure calories count - that the nutritional goods are in those energy units. Sugar feeds cancer, we now know, so, why would the doc say, “even empty calories - like ice cream, cookies, and sodas - are OK?”

Where and when did the disconnect happen between the science and art of medicine?

Can the docs read that this mama is ready to provide nutritional calories for her beloved twenty year old baby? Can’t they tell that she wants to do the very best she can for him?

Green juices made with real, fresh, organic produce offer micronutrients. Chlorophyl is a tonic to cells fatigued by chemo, but that same chemo therapy that may kill cancer cells also tanks a person’s immunity, so all those greens must be sanitized. The only way I’ve done that is by soaking the fresh greens, fruits and berries in a dilution of ten drops of grapefruit seed extract to a gallon of water for ten minutes, and then rinsing them with clear pure water.

There is some debate about pulverizing veggies in a high-speed blender (like Vita Mix) versus slow juicing which extracts the juice from the vegetable matter leaving behind the pulp. Each method has benefits and drawbacks as far as I can tell. Fiber is good. (The blender-made concoction.) More micronutrients per ounce in juice made in a juicer are also good. Perhaps having both options part of each week is best?

The point is, the curve balls make us dance - FAST! We try our best to figure out the most efficient moves to improve health or mood or living circumstances for those whom we love. Along the way, we learn a lot about how healing works, or doesn’t. I’m finding that, as I age, I’m more familiar with territory that used to be unknown. The first time I sat with a dying person, I was sixteen. I learned a lot. With each successive failure of Life to stick around in the body of someone I loved, I learned more. I learned about the futility of raging “... at the dying of the light.” (Dylan Thomas) 

I learned about the importance of meeting people where they are - even if their choices may be different from what I would choose. 

A friend who chose to go the organic juicing path, while eschewing any interventions from Western Medicine’s arsenal, died a painful death of breast cancer, but she was in charge and felt good about her choices.

A cousin who relied exclusively on Western Medicine’s finest  wisdom died of ovarian cancer at home with her hair and nails done and lying on the pink candy-striped sheets of her choosing.

Bottom line is: Death, like birth, is an individual affair. The choices available for those final months, days and hours are infinite.  Music? Morphine? Massage? Anything that makes sense to the dying and her/his family and friends is fair.

I just wish Life weren’t so skilled at the curve-ball routine. 

We don’t want a repeat performance of our “death of the month club,” for which we inadvertently signed up in 1989-1991. Within eighteen months, we lost thirteen people we loved and counted upon. It was bizarre, macabre, and difficult to catch our breath in between losses - which included both my husband’s parents, both my grandparents and step-father, friends from the AIDS epidemic, colleagues, co-workers, and the gardener of twelve years... oh, and our beloved fifteen year old dog “Fairfax.”

If you should happen to find that darkened field and come upon Life doing it’s warm-up routine to lob some more curve balls, won’t you please tell Life, “We’ve had enough death for this season. Cease and desist!"

Thank you!

May You HaveTime for Everything Under Heaven

In the dream, there’s a satisfying heft to the device hanging from my neck by a black cord. A little like a digital stop-watch, it holds two precious hours which I haven’t used up yet and which are available to me anytime I choose.

In reality, my yoga teacher gave me the gift of creating more time by whittling away at sleep with yogic practices. It was 1995 during an intensive Svaroopa(R) Yoga Teacher’s Training, when I learned experientially, not just theoretically, that if we do ten minutes of Ujjayii breathing, it replaces an hour of sleep - so effective is it at detoxifying, rejuvenating, and replenishing all the cells of our body. Further, deep meditation offers us a specific state of consciousness (turiya), of which we need three hours in twenty four. If we can reach that state in meditation, then we won’t have to sleep as long. 

During the three week intensive, we were immersed in physical practices, (learning yoga poses, adjustments and assists), chanting, meditation and pranayama - breathing practices - for fifteen hours each day. One of my students arranged for me stay in her vacation home in Ocean Beach - a forty minute drive from the yoga studio in La Jolla. To accommodate being present for the fifteen hour days, the drive, and the homework - including meal preparation and bathing, I was getting by nicely on four hours of sleep a night. It worked.

I’m wondering if the dream is calling me back to the practices which over time have abbreviated themselves. No. That’s not true. 

I have displaced the practices with more clients, more socializing and more sleep. I make choices every moment. Is the choice I’m making at this moment one that serves my ultimate goals? Hmmmm... that’s a potent question. I feel squirmish (squirmy and squeamish); unwilling to answer it straight on. 

If you could flip a switch and gain two hours a day, what would you do with those precious one hundred and twenty minutes?

I enjoy gardening, but I haven’t been doing much. I love cuddling with my husband, but some of that time has dropped away too as we get busier and busier. I love my work and have been saying "yes" more than "no" to requests to see clients with juicy, intriguing cases. I’m showing up for the writing with a match at my butt - meaning only on Sunday nights to crank out this blog, but not much beyond that. I LOVE spending time with the amazing four-year-old-grandest-granddaughter in the world and her mom & auntie. I love to sing, dance, write, hike, read, cook and converse.

So, what do I WANT to do with my time? All of the above and more. 

As I age, the fact that time is finite comes into sharper, clearer, devastatingly crystalline view. It hurts my eyes and makes me want to sleep more. And, at the same time, the scarcity of time propels me out of bed for fear of missing out on all I want to do before I shuffle off to Buffalo, recycle my soul, or chuck the bod. 

James Thurber said, “It is better to have loafed and lost than never to have loafed at all.”

E.B. White said: "I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day."

I say, “I want to save and savor the world. Which will it be today?” 

My favorite toast (besides gluten free with lots of butter and cinnamon) is:

Salud, Amor y Pesetas, y Tiempo para gastarlos!

Health, Love and Money, and the Time to enjoy them.

May you enjoy all there is to enjoy on the planet in a timely way.

Happy Harvests.