On Turning 60

by

Lavender Honey

My friend George died six months ago today.

He died as fall was fading into winter. Now, with the waning of spring, there are signs of summer. The lilac blossoms are gone. The lavender stalks will blossom within a day or two. I pass the lavender on my way from the house to my writing shed.

It’s not so much that I miss their scent throughout the rest of the year as that I anticipate it as I see the passage of time in my garden. I know that one morning the scent will be there — a presence. Along with that — the faint buzz of bees. I wonder where they are making their lavender honey.

Lavender honey.

The sound of those words — lavender honey — slows me down. I’ve been wanting to slow down. Not having time slow down, I know that’s not possible, but my slowing down. Taking time to feel that there is time enough, if I let it be.

George’s dying was hard for me. I thought I would be a much bigger part of it because we met as hospice volunteers. I actually think that George pushed me away, as he did many others. He was so sweet and supportive that everyone thought that’s what George wanted—to be up close sweetly supported.

But, really, George kept people at bay. I suspect that for complicated reasons, he just felt safer that way. And so that’s how his dying went. In retrospect, I can see how bravely he faced it; how he marshaled all the forces he was accustomed to using in relationships to carry him through this most difficult of relationships. The one we have with dying.

Contained anger was a big force with George. I suspect that underneath that anger was the pain that people he loved both loved and betrayed him. That’s a difficult dichotomy to live with.

Fifteen months between his diagnosis and his death. During that time, lavender’s presence graced the path to my writing shed. I couldn’t tell you the day I noticed it was gone. Or even if I noticed it was gone. It’s just that once again, I anticipate its presence.

A friend who was a midwife to George’s death recently listened to the music Tom and Rob created that night that George died. She said it captured his breathing as he made his way through his final breaths.

Inspiration means filled with the gods. Perhaps expiration is about releasing them—releasing all those life forces that animate us.

About three months before he died, George wrote and then made a video recording of a message he wanted to leave behind. I watched it recently. Frankly, I can’t remember specifics. I just know that it brought his presence back to me. It’s the presence that isn’t armored with contained anger.

Loving is neither simple, nor easy. Sometimes you have to stand at the precipice of disappointment of what you wanted and what you got—and be grateful. For me, that’s being in a state of grace.

If Tom’s and Rob’s music is any reflection of George’s dying, then he died in a state of grace.

I read recently that grace is the unearned gift.

Grace.

Lavender honey.

Unearned gifts.

by

Small Feet for a Girl My Size: a Mothers’ Day Post

Feminism. It makes sense to me why that is a good topic for Mothers’ Day. Perhaps I will know why it makes sense to me by the end of this post.

mamamear1I got inspired to write about feminism after reading the interview page in today’s New York Times magazine. Its subject was Martha Stewart.

Two things I learned from her interview:

She suggests that women make pillows out of their husbands’ old shirts, rather than just turning them into rags.

She doesn’t consider that she is a feminist.

I’m going to riff on the pillow-made-out-of-a-husband’s-old-shirt first. It sounds suspiciously like the doll who hid the toilet paper to me. Perhaps, even as I write, former shirts worn by current husbands are showing up in living rooms all across the nation, just as the doll who hid the toilet paper showed up in bathrooms in my childhood.

I have often thought that my grandmother was an Oakie Martha Stewart. She put two orange crates together, then sewed a skirt to attach to it to make a dressing table. This was in her new home, the one she set up after she married my grandfather. She was nineteen. The year was nineteen and nine.

“It was just darlin’,’”she told me.

I’m sure it was; she very talented.

I’m assuming that the pillows forged from husband’s shirts are shirts from current husbands. Although there could be a peculiar kind of revenge, I guess from turning a former husband’s favorite shirt into a pillow and displaying it on your sofa.

What worries me about that pillow forged from a husband’s shirt is this: Did that shirt go willingly into pillowhood, or was it marched there by the wife who decided that the shirt was no longer something her husband should wear? At what point did the wife look at her husband, sitting on the sofa and think, “That goes with the furniture”?

What say did the husband have in all of this?

I do not understand homes where the woman decides when a husband’s shirt should become a pillow, or a rag, for that matter. I know a woman who will not let her husband have an espresso maker because she likes to have nothing on her counters. Her husband loves espresso.

I don’t get this.

And now for the feminism part.

I get accused of everything from being so feminist that I’m a lesbian biker’s chick to not being feminist enough. I am a feminist, but I am also a progressive, a good cook, a film lover, a writer, a director, a producer. I have relatively small feet. I wear a size six. Or, as the nasty petite girl in high school who prided herself on being tinier than anyone else said when she learned my shoe size was smaller than hers, “You have small feet for a girl your size.”

So I might also be someone who has small feet for my size.

Whatever, none of these things in themselves define me. I am all of the above (though I still don’t know if my feet are small for my size, or just smaller than the average foot size of a grown woman, unless you are in Asia).

I have a problem with the pillow-shirt thing (as well as the espresso maker) because I am suspicious that it has to do with control. We all pretty much feel uncomfortable when we feel we are out of control. We want to know we have some control in our own environment. But, I think it becomes pathological when we need to control others in order for us to feel in control.

That, I believe, is what feeling powerless leads to.

To me, feminism is about owning our own power. I don’t mean this in any kind of woo woo or even political way. I mean that we don’t sacrifice authenticity to being acceptable – to being a “nice” or “good” girl; that we take the risk of admitting what we want, embracing who we are, loving as if it matters, regardless of what the rule book says.

What feminism does not mean to me is that men are the enemies or that women have the right to control them.

Martha Stewart went to jail while Jack Abramhoff was left free to rob people blind. I’m going to go out on a limb and say that sexism was at the bottom of the decision to take Martha down a peg or two, just to show the rest of us what can happen if you succeed.

It concerns me that Martha’s says she isn’t a feminist. It makes me wonder that she might be one of those women who isn’t concerned about rising so that we can rise together. I worry that she thinks that my feet are small for a girl my size, because if my feet are smaller than hers (I’m talking metaphor here; for all I know she might wear a size four), it somehow diminishes her.

I believe that we are all a part of this big confusing soup where we should be trying to figure out how we can make sure there is room at the table for everyone.

I wanted to make sure, as I directed The Vagina Monologues, that it told a story about women; not a story about women as victims. The cast member who raised a question if she thought I was wandering off into male bashing territory was a lesbian; her passionate domestic life was with a woman. She had children (including sons) from a previous marriage – a marriage with a man.

She was not bitter towards her former husband. I trusted her instincts about something veering into male bashing because I think she understood that that kind of rhetoric could damage her sons. Damage them in the same way that women’s souls have been damaged by anger towards women.

She is truly that crocodile mom – the one who carries her young to safety in her strong jaws. She understands that mothering is the presence of primal strength and creation.

So I guess that’s the relationship between feminism and Mothers’ Day for me. Mothering and feminism are the presence of primal strength and creation. The source of the strength and creation comes from within us.

I think that once we can own that, struggles over power and control fall by the wayside. And that allows us all to rise together.

Happy Mothers’ Day.

by

 My Mother the Speedboat

I am a motherless daughter. Betty Jean Cole Hogan died on July 19, 2006. She was 83.

Our relationship was as complicated as she was – and I am, for that matter.

I have a vague recollection of watching episodes of I Remember Mama – a fifties television series based on a memoir of a Norwegian-American immigrant’s childhood in San Francisco. Each episode opens with the daughter leafing through the family album. She remembers everyone pictured. But mostly, she says, I remember Mama.

Mama.

My mother was not a Mama. She wasn’t Mother. She was Mom.

When I leaf through albums I see her at twenty wearing a swimsuit and riding a tricycle. In another, she and my father hoist a giant beer stein at the Hofbrauhaus in Munich. In another, she lounges, one leg lying flat, the other bent with her foot flat on the couch, the back of her hand resting on her forehead. I think she was nineteen in that photo. It’s very sensual. I wonder what she was thinking at that moment.

In another photo, she stands with her arms around my brothers and me. She wears a coat, a scarf on her head, and dark cotton gloves. It’s the mid-fifties. We are waiting to board a plane – somewhere in Europe. Women dressed up to fly on planes in those days; they wore scarves and gloves and girdles and stockings with a seam up the back that took some work to keep straight.

Later in life, she told me that during World War II, when women couldn’t get stockings (either nylon or silk), they used eyebrow pencil to draw a seam up the back of their legs, so it looked like they wore stockings.

She also told me that at every airport she cupped her gloved hand under the mouth of one of us as, with no warning other than, “Mom, I need to throw up,” we threw up into the thick cotton. I guess she carried extra pairs with her.

The fifties and sixties were the TV era of perfect mothers. June Cleaver always wore pearls and a dress even when she vacuumed. I saw my mother vacuum while wearing a dress only once. We got out of school at noon because President Kennedy had been shot. She had been grocery shopping when she heard. The television was on when I arrived home. My mother was vacuuming.

My mother was not a vacuumer. And yet, there she was, wearing a dress and heels, pushing the Hoover upright vacuum forwards and yanking it backwards, making her way across the den. I was a freshman in high school. I had walked home with tears streaming down my face. But seeing my mother in her dress and high heels vacuuming in the middle of a weekday brought it home. Something profound had happened.

Mom was not known for her culinary skills. She did not bake. She claimed that margarine tasted better than butter because butter was too rich. But her beans and meatballs on a cold rainy night could not be beat.

Recipe:

Cook dry pinto beans according to the package instructions.

Add salt and pepper to a pound of hamburger meat.

Turn the hamburger into meatballs.

Throw the meatballs into the pot of beans and cook until done

Serve over store-bought sliced white bread (store brand works fine) that has been slathered with margarine.

Set out the bottle of ketchup because someone will want to put ketchup on it.

Things got complicated between us as I strayed further from the farm – the metaphorical farm that is – because there was nothing farm-like about my mom. The metaphorical farm was about limits; what a woman could do and what she wasn’t supposed to do.

My mother really didn’t want the limits, and stretched them pretty far given she was an Oklahoma-born Baptist – one who drank, smoked, and danced.

In the forties and fifties movies, Van Johnson married June Allyson. They had babies but no sex as far as I can tell. On the other hand, Bogie got together with Bacall. They clearly had sex, but never babies.

The movie version of my parents would have Van Johnson marrying Lauren Bacall. When my mother succumbed to the inevitable and placed my Alzheimer’s addled father into a nursing home, I gave my mother a vibrator. About a month later she took me aside to tell me how happy she was with her little friend.

Betty Jean was full of contradictions. Mostly we were close. But at the very end of her life we were not. I kept thinking we would bridge the chasm.

But for her to do that would have required that she take a stand about abuse – an abusive system that had become embedded for so many generations in my family that this abnormal behavior had become normalized. She did not physically abuse me, but she had learned to retreat in fear when the men in the family became abusive. Her son, my older brother, was one of those men.

His emotionally abusive behavior escalated over the years. In 1998 , in my mother’s house, he punched me in the jaw. Typical of the behavior – he blamed me.

She could not find a way to reject the abusive behavior without rejecting her son – and she could not do that. And so she left me to fend for myself with it, saying it was between my brother and me.

On Saturday, July 15, 2006, my younger brother got married. His wife had insisted that everyone had to be invited to the wedding, including the brother who had punched me. In her mind, I should take the high road because family togetherness trumped all. I had come to believe that sacrificing my safety to perpetuate a misguided story of family togetherness was not the road I wanted to take.

It was difficult. Some people called to tell me I owed it to my mother to go to the wedding – it might be the last time the family would all be together. I should take the high road. The high road came up a lot.

They didn’t understand the language I had learned to speak. I didn’t feel safe. It would not be fun or comfortable for me. I had to matter and the system didn’t allow for that. So I chose mattering to me. That was my high road.

As the wedding drew near, everyone felt uncomfortable, particularly my mother. We didn’t speak about it. I decided to bide my time. I figured that somehow, after the wedding, we would be able to bridge the chasm.

The wedding happened. I busied myself that day so I didn’t think about it taking place in the same town. Then on Sunday, the 16th she broke her hip

I went to the emergency room, wondering how I was going to deal with seeing my brothers. But no one was there. My older brother had dropped her off at the hospital then took off to fly back to North Carolina. My younger brother and his new wife continued their after-wedding party.

So I ended up having time alone with my mother. I saw the look on her face when the ER doctor told her that her hip was broken into four pieces. She was pretty much in end stage emphysema at that point, so recovering from a broken hip was an uphill battle that would lead nowhere for her.

I could tell she had made her decision.

I tried to ask her about it, but she didn’t want to talk. She took the morphine and drifted off.

I still held out hope we would have our final conversation, but she went in and out of consciousness the next two days. Then pneumonia set in. They moved her to the ICU. When I got there, she looked at me and said, “I thought I was dying.”

“Is that what you want?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said.

And so they stopped everything but the morphine. She died late that afternoon. Her last words came as they gave her the first dose of comfort-care morphine. “Give me lots,” she said.

Love and life and relationships are very complicated. I was pretty much devastated that we never had the chance to get back to intimate moments she and I had experienced over my adult years. It’s the kind of intimacy that comes out of being in the same place at the same time. We were together during my grandmother’s final days and my father’s. We had had intimate talks about how she wanted to die.

But in the very end, the intimacy went unacknowledged. That’s confusing at best, and traumatic at its worst. A part of me felt like a five-year-old girl whose mother told her she didn’t like her.

Mother’s don’t get off the hook easily. I think we might be more forgiving of our father’s foibles. It’s a real shock to find out that we are not the center and be-all of our mother’s universe.

At some point, I noticed that the wound was no longer open. I no longer felt like a bereft five-year old. Instead, I had become a grown woman who understands how complicated it can be to be a mother. How imperfect that love is.

I’ve learned how to receive imperfect love, and to understand that I didn’t need to be the center of my mother’s universe for me to become a woman.

There was a TV program in the sixties called My Mother, the Car. I never saw even one episode. I have no idea how “mother” was portrayed in that series.

But about a month after my mom died, Tom and I were having dinner on the patio of a restaurant. It was in a small shopping mall, so the patio butted up against the parking lot.

An enormous pickup truck came lumbering by the restaurant, a speedboat in tow. It made no sense. Why was this truck driving through the parking lot? Taking a short cut?

As the boat passed us by we saw its name painted on the side. Betty Jean.

I could see it. My mother reincarnated as a speed boat, heading out for a good time on the delta.

I think that perhaps the gift she left me was the imperfection of her love.

by

Following your Bliss – the Path of Joy and Sorrow

I attended Bliss last night – the annual fundraiser for Maitri, the hospice run by the San Francisco Zen Center. The facility primarily serves people with end-stage AIDS, but it was where my friend George spent his final days last year. His life was ended by a sarcoma.

George had been a Maitri Board member for years.

The event was held at the Presidio in the Golden Gate Club. What a place. No longer a military post, the grounds that overlook the Bay and Golden Gate now is home to wonderful creative endeavors, including Industrial Light and Magic. Acres and acres of creativity, beautiful architecture, and a forest of native trees.

What a place to celebrate the work that Maitri does and the lives that have passed through its facility.

Taiko drums greeted guests on the patio as they entered the event. But these were not traditional Taiko drummers. I call them the Taiko Drum Crones. There was such joy in their performance. A Gamelan orchestra performed, then provided the music for Balinese dancers, who told a story with their hands, their feet, their body, and their eyes.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

George died five months ago today. Maitri certainly provided the house of shelter for George’s pilgrimage towards death. Their attention to the aesthetics, including their providing nourishing food that was pleasing to the palate as well as to the eye, is a reminder that we are living even as we are dying.

It is to me what compassion for being human is about.

George’s passing happened in the fast lane. It barreled down that road at lightning speed – a bare 15 months between his diagnosis and death.

Now, five months later, life continues. The lilacs that burst into bloom in my garden are already fading. They have had their moment in the sun.

A few days ago it was cold and rainy. Today the air of the blue sky is somewhere between spring and summer. It is a gentle day.

Life is change. Follow your bliss.

I used to wonder what my bliss was. I thought it had to be something big. The dictionary defines it as profound happiness.

So much of my life has been spent measuring the value of what I was doing by whether I was being nice enough. And nice meant making people happy and keeping them happy.

Which is, of course, an impossible task. Happiness is fleeting.

I don’t like that word happy, or happiness. It seems so limiting to me. For me it does not embrace sorrow, and I don’t think you can experience true joy if you are not willing to also embrace sorrow.

Joy leads to sorrow and sorrow leads to joy.

I saw that last night.

And so, my bliss is found in the answer to the question that wall keeps insisting that I answer before it will let me pass: what do you want to do with your time and your life?

Having the faith to follow your bliss – well, that is a challenge. But then, so is life.

by

Life in the Fast — and Slow — Lane

There are many paths to choose from, and none of them go anywhere. Yet you must carefully choose which path you will take.

Jean Shinoda Bolen, from Crones Don’t Whine

I found the phrase “life in the fast – and slow – lane” in my last book of morning pages. I wrote it about six weeks after my friend George died.

I’m not even sure why the phrase bubbled up again as I wrote this morning, but I think is has something to do with my wondering whether I should Twitter. As I look back at that last sentence, I realize that “should” is the word that dominates for me.

I heard recently that an agent said he would not even touch a writer who did not have a platform – platform comprising Facebook, a blog, and Twitter. For each, you have to have a following.

A friend of mine who Twitters told me recently that she had been off it for twelve hours and had already lost ground.

Oh, my. Or, as my old Irish grandmother would say, “Fook!” (I love the way the Irish pronounce fuck. It has all of the heft, but seems to lose some of the stigma attached to using the word.)

I was a technical writer for more than twenty-five years. I prided myself on learning technical concepts quickly and understanding how they applied to our daily lives. Twenty years ago, I worked for Hayes, the leading modem company at the time. Their new business purpose was to integrate telephone technology – which hadn’t progressed much since it was first introduced – into computer technology.

Now I have an iPhone. I can take a call, surf the Internet, and send an email simultaneously — though I don’t usually do that. My email can reach a recipient who lives half way across the globe within seconds.

Science fiction isn’t.

This brings me back to Twitter. Remember that old telephone company ad that encouraged us to “Reach out and touch someone” with a phone call? How happy it made the receiver of the phone call to hear from the person who initiated the phone call?

I appreciate that Twitter technology has the potential to let us reach out and touch thousands of someones – with 140 characters or less.

What I want to do is tell story, so I wondered if one could do that in 140 characters or less. Then I remembered Ernest Hemingway’s famous six-word story:

For sale.
Baby shoes.
Never worn.

Thirty-two characters, including spaces between words and line breaks.

I also remembered words that came to a friend on Twitter in which a woman described the emotional scene engendered by the mechanics of taking care of her father after an operation. “Over time,” she wrote, “this will be more graceful.”

I have never seen a more poignant description of that emotionally confusing moment when a parent has to relinquish the power of caretaker over to the child.

So one can tell a story in 140 characters or less. And that is an interesting challenge for a writer.

My problem is with the notion that I can’t be away from Twitter for twelve hours or I will lose ground – that the relationships I built through Twitter might not endure a twelve hour gap in attention. That seems more like a one-night stand than a connection to me.

Yet, I’m fascinated by the potential of Twitter for a writer. Actually, I am fascinated by the potential of Twitter to create connections around the world.

But, for me, the important word is “connection.”

I’m definitely more of a face-to-face person. I like to have coffee or a meal with friends. For me, that is the grace of everyday living: taking the time to spend time with someone and letting the conversation take us wherever it leads.

I am at some kind of a crossroads at this moment. As I move into the world with my new story firmly implanted in my heart, I find that I come up against a wall. It isn’t a brick wall. It is a wall that insists that I answer the question, “What do you want to do with your time, with your life?” before it will let me pass.

I pulled the Komodo Dragon card this morning from the Animal Tarot deck. Dragons, it says are not to be slain, but to be tamed – to be tamed so we can use their fiery energy to benefit our creative souls. It is a part of the suit labeled Ancients.

The song “Danny Boy,” I read might have been written during the Irish Diaspora – that period of time when so many Irish left their homes for lands far away. Wake-like social events were held the nights before they departed. They were wake-like for in truth – their departure was like a death. Chances were they would never see their families again. A letter sent might arrive long after the recipient had died.

So I understand that technology can connect us. How much easier would it have been on them if they could have heard the voice of their loved one? Or received an email seconds after it was sent? Or even a 140-character-or-less Tweet sent by an Irish immigrant from Dublin, California that said something like:

I scrunch my toes into the green hill above my house and feel you beside me.

What I hope to accomplish with my stories is to write about those moments that give us an epiphany of what it is to be human – to understand that we are mortal, and that it is in our mortality that we find the purpose of our lives.

I want to live life in the fast lane that is the future, but to know when to switch to the slow lane – when to let ancient wisdom take the time it needs to ensure that I carefully choose the fast lane I merge into – the one that leads to a future that considers the seventh generation.

As I started writing this, I worried that my concern about Twittering means that I am a dinosaur. That the world is moving too fast, and that I am part of an irrelevant past.

I suspect that there is no answer to that. Since none of the paths go anywhere, I am just stuck with choosing carefully, the one I decide to take.