Overdrawn At The Memory Bank

Clever of me to start a blog and completely forget how to log into it. But gmail is very forgiving, and gave me a clue to the name I used. Two months have gone by, and it's hard to remember why I wanted to write a blog in the first place, especially since I've told no one where to find it. I guess that means I'm writing it for myself. It's kind of creepy to think how much people can find out about me on the internet, including what I buy, my Amazon wish list, and so on. Maybe that really is too much information.

Life is about the same, except that I'm closer to getting braces on my teeth, and I have knee replacement surgery scheduled for January. This really scares me. I don't know all the details, and I understand that the recovery is brutal. I'm supposed to be pre-habbing, and I can't even arrange to go work out in the pool at the gym. I've had all week since I got back from out of town, and I have been either too sore, too bummed out, or too busy in the afternoon to go. That has to change. I have things I want to do, and a slow recovery just doesn't fit into my plans.

On a personal level, nothing much has changed there, either. That's sad. Not much to do about that at present, just try to get myself as healthy as possible, and remember that the only person I can change is me. This is Nellie saying "Over and out." (Any old "Sky King" fans out there?)

"I heard the crash on the highway but I didn't hear nobody pray."

Today I sat down and leisurely read my way through the Saturday paper, my favorite sections first. When I finished the color comics (save the best for last!) I noticed the front section, which had been under all the others. “410 crash: ten years later” it said, right at the top, a reminder of everyone’s worst nightmare, that unaccountable sudden tragedy that swoops down from out of nowhere. It’s a day many people can never forget. And unlike the crash in Roy Acuff's song, "The Wreck on the Highway", it wasn't caused by whiskey, but by poor road design.

Highway 401 runs across Ontario, and through Essex County, where I live, ending at the run-up to the Ambassador Bridge to Detroit, the busiest border crossing between Canada and the United States. On the day of the crash, the beginning of a Labor Day Weekend, a thick fog settled across part of the 401, and cars doing 100km an hour suddenly drove into a wall of blackness. A transport truck hit that wall, hit his brakes, and the resulting carnage spread over more than a kilometer of highway, four lanes wide. The chain reaction was over in minutes, and so loud that people heard it several miles away. Eight people died, 45 were hurt, and many more were left grieving.

The agony of those survivors, and the family and friends of those who died cannot be underestimated. I’m thinking today of another group of people, the people who were too early or too late for the crash, who for some reason were delayed in getting on the highway, or left earlier on a whim. A friend at church missed the whole thing because he went to get cash at an ATM, not his usual habit. Instead of just grabbing a Tims (coffee, for you foreigners) before his commute to work in London, he went by the bank. He had no idea what made him do it. I’m sure there are others who today are remembering their near miss with death, and wondering what caused it. Why were they spared? And spared for what? Was there even a reason, or was this just another example of the randomness of the universe?

I don’t have an answer. I’m glad our friend was spared, as just thinking about him makes me smile. He does that to people. I’m pretty sure he believes that God had more work for him to do, and that taking him home in 1999 wasn’t the plan.

It could be argued that this was literally an accident just waiting to happen. That stretch of the 401 is regularly plagued by fogs and mists, given the right air temperature and humidity. Driving through that stretch of road at night was terrifying, when there was even a little fog. And there was only a narrow shoulder between the car and a ditch.

Now, of course, the shoulder has been widened, and a rumble strip added. That was two of the 18 recommendations that arose from the coroner’s inquest. As a bonus, two more lanes have been added, and a median barrier to replace the “rollover ditch” that regularly flung wandering cars into oncoming lanes of traffic. The Ohio Turnpike has had these safety features in place for many years, which is not a comfort to those of us who feel we have diced with fate every time we drive to London or Toronto. So, was the horrible crash the twisted will of a malign fate, or was it due simply to lack of oversight from the Ministry of Transportation, despite years of complaints by groups (including the CAA) and individuals? Did this tragedy just come down to politics? That won’t matter to the people who cringe away from the headline this weekend. I'll be enjoying a safer Highway 401 this weekend as I drive to London, and I'll be thinking of that crash ten years ago.

It's never all about us.

Today I had reason to be reminded of something a friend once told me, that she got along much better with her husband when she didn't take everything he said and did, personally. I remember thinking at the time that she must have been a very uncaring person, but now I can see her detachment was a decision, not a lack of caring.

The events of life, and even the action and words of people close to us, are what they are. If we take every action and word of every person, every delay in a supermarket line-up, every mistake someone makes, as a personal attack, something aimed particularly at us, our lives become an unending source of misery. What other people can do, or how other people function, may not have anything to do with us at all. Other people have their own reasons for their words and actions, and the world moves along either with or without us, but not solely for us. Good things happen, really terrible things happen, stupid things happen. Attaching personal meaning to these happenings may be a big mistake.

Because I have a vivid imagination, and can "see" how a room would look repainted, a house remodeled, a new garden put in, sometimes I have trouble dealing with the reality of the present. I look at the people close to me, and see them remodeled as well, as if I was watching a television with a split screen. Then I need to remember that not everything can be changed, or needs to be changed, and there are many things in life to be enjoyed in the moment, in the very here-and-now.

My own emotional energy is better spent in enjoying what I have, or if I want a change, planning for that change and taking steps towards it, rather than kicking and stomping because the alternate reality I see is not present, and may never be. I need to be constantly reminded of this, and believe me, life comes along and constantly reminds me. Whether one wishes to call it the slap upside the head of the Holy Spirit, or karma, or "when the student is ready, the teacher appears", I get the message. Over and over, but I get it, a little better every time.

Jon Kabat Zin has written some books that repeat this message over and over. If you need a nudge, get a copy of "Where Ever You Go, There You Are," or any of his other books on mindfulness. You may just get that nudge that shifts your paradigm, much as an Escher print does. Just step a little to one side, tilt your head, and reality is zing! something else. Top is bottom, bottom is top, and there is beauty in the smallest thing. It is easier for one to change one's viewpoint, than to change the whole of reality. So find a way to see what's real, and you may be surprised at what you find.

You may be saying, "But I tell my spouse over and over not to do this, not to buy that, to change in some way that seems crucial, and my words are ignored. My spouse does, or doesn't do, the same things, over and over. That says to me that my spouse doesn't care." Maybe it does, maybe it doesn't, maybe it's something your spouse can't change, maybe it's not important in the life of the universe. And what's going on in your head, in yourself, that causes this to tip you over the edge? Let go of it for a while, even for five minutes, and look or listen or feel, or taste something and do nothing else. Let your thoughts float by as they arise, like wispy clouds. Picture the words sailing by, like a closed caption on your tv, here they come, there they go, gone. You'll have pushed your reset button, gotten yourself unstuck, just enough to see what it's like. And you can always go back do it again, anytime. Try it and see what happens.

Don't Trust Anyone Over Thirty

Well, it had to happen. Those of use who heard (and sometimes believed) that we should never trust anyone over thirty, now are twice thirty, plus a little. And we find it hard to trust anyone UNDER thirty. After all, they're just kids, virtual youngsters, what do they know? It's difficult for us to have faith in a someone who comes to fix the furnace who's younger than our children.
A young internet friend of mine published a diatribe about rapatious baby boomers in her blog sometime back, and couldn't understand why anyone would take offense. Guess she really thought that it's not mean if it's true. I didn't think it was even true. Her comments about baby boomers moving over financially to let the younger people have some of the gravy was reminiscent of the sci/fi fantasy stories that posited an automatic death for older members of society, no longer useful, just dead weights. We grasping dead weights are the ones who built much of the culture she enjoys, although I'm sure she thinks we built it all wrong. It's true that some boomers spent so much time and energy in self-aggrandizement, that they gave short shrift to anything but their own ambition and greed, too selfabsorbed to nurture their offspring, the now disaffected gen-x-ers, the thirty-somethings who think their parents' generation screwed things up.
From fifties "adjustment", conservatism and work ethic, to seventies entitlement and greed, that's how they see things have gone. They miss the vast number of boomers who may not have turned on and tuned out, but who assumed a concern for the conservation of the ecology and the culture that they loved. They miss the sixty-somethings who went to church, were social activists, put family first, donated to foreign missions, volunteered within the community, held down jobs, paid taxes, and carried on the valued ways left to them by the previous generation. This is the core of baby boomers which gen-x and gen-next haven't taken into account.
These passionate baby boomers are now puzzled and more than vaguely disturbed, as they see multinational coporations dice for control of everything, the whole enchilada, with budgets larger than some countries, and more power than many governments. These huge companies are determining what people wear and eat, where they live, what news they hear or see, what entertains them, with the crushing weight of a totalitarian regime. Baby boomers don't think they were the ones who set this in motion, as they think back to their small rebellions of natural birth, breastfeeding, and organic cotton baby clothing. While they were sewing on missing buttons, and eating whole foods and buying things second hand, the huge companies were flooding the market with cheap products that wore out fast, were cheaper to replace than fix, with cheap clothing made by slave labor. These boomers were shocked to find that their carefully sought-out bargains came from the present day equivalent of the Victorian impecunious semptstress, who moved from one great home to another to provide a family with clothing, with no economic safety net or social programs. While they tried to find economical used cars with good gas milage, that didn't fall apart in two years, they were shocked to discover that their gasoline came from places like Nigeria, where whole areas of the country are nearly uninhabitable from pollution from oil refineries, and where the federal army runs a brutal security detail for big oil companies. Seemingly while their backs were turned, the food on their table became suspect, adulterated with pesticides, genetic modifications, hormones and melamine. When they investigate what their income investments are based on, they find that they are earning money off the backs of the poor, all over the world, as big business panders to the stockholders, which include them.
The boomers are a group divided. Some are ready to retire, live off the fat of the land (unless their Chryler pensions are cancelled) and let others worry about the state of the world. Others wonder how they can ignore human rights violations, a poisoned ecology, and an ever-widening gap between the haves and have nots. While some laud the progress that has brought much of North America to affluency, others are sadly shaking their heads, and wondering who slipped this by them. I'm in the group that feels like Sleeping Beauty awaking; somehow, we've missed something.
As a member of the best educated, most activist group of retirees in the history of the world, I'm ready to question the status quo as much as the thirty-somethings. I'm not going to sit down and shut up. I have a lot more to do, and a lot more to change. And I've got to get a move on, because the clock is ticking. I'm living in a semi-revolving door empty nest, and who knows when one of the children (and family) need to come back home to recoup. My spouse isn't getting any younger, and neither am I. Suddenly my days are structured by appointments with the doctor, the chiropractor, and various labs. And this is to achieve increased wellness, rather than treat something really dire. Some days I worry that I still need to find out what I'm going to do when I grow up. Maybe, like many boomers, what I'm going to do when I grow up is really what I'm doing right now. More and more, every day, I see that life is what happens while you're making plans. Maybe I should have planned better. But think what I would have missed. And if my continued volunteer efforts help one more woman breastfeed for a few months longer, I've slowed the juggernaut of multinational artificial baby milk companies just that little bit.

"It takes a lot of slow to grow."

Got a question today from a Facebook friend, and it started me thinking. She wanted to know why she should leave her baby breastmilk in a sippy cup when she went out, rather than the bottle that he likes. Everyone seemed to think she should leave him with a cup.

That question is more complicated than it seems at first. Breastmilk from a bottle is not going to encourage tooth decay the way formula from a bottle does. The advice about rigidly weaning from a bottle by a certain age seems to be aimed at formula-fed babies. So, easy answer, right? Keep using the bottle. On the other hand, our culture won't let babies and children grown up at their own pace, preferring to push them jog-trot through every developmental stage of their lives. One-year-olds are expected to self-soothe in the way that much older children are able to.
Children haven't changed from the 1950's, or even the 1970's, when they slept in cribs for several years, and had naps until they went to school. Perhaps too much emphasis was placed on getting children to bed, early enough, and long enough, but at least children weren't expected to behave nicely while they shopped at Walmart at 10 p.m. So while they may have been expected to give up their bottles by a certain age, everyone knew they were little even thirty or forty years ago.
What is our preoccupation with making children grow up, and quickly give up their childish ways of coping with life? Is there something innately moral about controlling every aspect of a baby or child's life, leaving no room for their opinions? Is this just the continued fall-out of the Puritans and the industrial revolution? Do we have to give up being who we are as biological beings and mammals, in order to have paved streets and running water? If we let our babies nurse as long as they want, and toilet train whenever, will this be the end of civilization as we know it?
I just read an article about breastfeeding in Mongolia, where breastmilk is revered, and the best wrestlers are said to have nursed until they were six. No one plots to have the baby off the breast by a certain age, or puzzles over what the baby wants when it's unhappy. In goes the breast, no matter what. The description of two moms stopping a fight between their two-year-olds by hiking up their shirts and waving their breasts enticingly was just hysterical. I have seen moms employ similar strategies, although more discreetly, and they weren't living in a yurt.
It seems that anything that makes a baby feel good, like sucking on whatever it wants, whenever it wants, is looked on with suspicion in North America. So of course it would make sense to give a cup instead of a bottle, because they are not as satisfying. This is a cultural thing, as well as a response to the scientific evidence about bottles of formula causing tooth decay. The idea that we have to make babies and children give up something they enjoy, seems to be part of our culture, as if they won't grow up unless we make them do it. Other cultures are more relaxed about this, and often they are cultures where life is very hard, yet babies grow up to be strong, emotionally resilient adults.
Maybe if we babied our babies when they were babies, they would grow up to be strong, emotionally resilient adults as well. Some psychologists believe that a major task of parenting is to teach babies and children to be hopeful, that if they look, and wait, and are patient, something good will come along. How easy it is to teach this hopefulness of something good by beginning with the promise of what is hidden under mother's shirt.

Introductions All Round

Hello. Thanks for stopping by. This is a new experience for me, writing whatever I want, without responding to the post or question of someone else. I have to give credit to the movie "Julie and Julia" for the idea to start a blog, but I won't be working through Julia Child's cookbook in a year. I'll be practicing mindfullness, and getting healthy. And in all likelihood, I'll be complaining about my easy life, as we all tend to do until suddenly something happens to get our attention.

Shall I introduce myself? I am a woman of a certain age, married, an empty nester, a grandmother, too old to have babies and too young to sit and rock on the porch. The title of my blog will give you an idea of what fills my days, in between my on-going search for meaning, cooking for as many of the family as can come home for birthdays and holidays, and visits to my elderly mother in Florida. There is also major on-line shopping, and the always popular, ever-increasing medical appointments to deal with the results of getting older.



When did this happen, this getting older? How can it be so long ago that I was a teenager who worshiped Andre Norton, and wrote stories for my favorite TV show? I go on Facebook and I'm channeling my inner twenty-something geek. (College Humor makes me roar.)



I'd be so much more interesting as a twenty-something now, if I could go back and do it over again. But really, it wouldn't pay to go back further than thirty: twenty-something body, thirty-something brain, sixty-something common sense. It could work.



In my life PK (pre-kids) I was a librarian, and I still love books. Anything from Caldecott picture books right on up to psychology and philosophy. I audit a course a term at our local university, courtesy of free tuition, which gives me one night a week to find someone else other than my long-suffering husband with which to have lively discussions. He calls them arguments.



Part of my Facebook persona is the wise counselor, who answers the questions of concerned young mothers of babies. Young women I will never meet thank me for my wisdom, while my children wonder if I'm becoming demented, and worry about my driving. So, welcome to my schizoid life. At one moment I could be whining about my bad knees, and at the next I could be ecstatic from watching sugar dissolving onto the ice cubes in my glass of tea. It will be a constant surprise to both of us.