Cranberries and other simple blessings

Thanksgiving might just be my favorite holiday. My Christmas tree usually goes up the day after Thanksgiving and comes down on Epiphany, marking 6 weeks of giving thanks, giving gifts and giving myself new goals to fall short of by the following New Year's Eve.

Christmas is delightful, but as holidays go, it's a bit confused. While I deeply honor the birth of Jesus, my inner nitpicker is a little too aware that December 25 was a date appointed by human design. Besides, Jesus' gifts were less about price and more about cost. Saint Nicholas is a much better match for our current Christmas traditions. By all accounts a very good man, he is also the patron saint of merchants, thieves and little children.

Easter is lovely, and I don't mind having eggs and rabbits gathered around the open tomb. But Easter is really about life beyond the limits of our five senses – hard to capture in a simple holiday.

July 4^th, Memorial Day, Veterans Day: our holidays mark the passage of time and events, and that is good. The cycles of tradition carry bits of flotsam that show where we came from and who we have become and draw us back together when the petty differences of life divide us.

Thanksgiving, on the other hand, is more than tradition. It's a celebration of the simple blessings of humanity and cooperation.

Forget our petty arguments. Can you think of two groups whose agendas were more diametrically opposed than the Pilgrims and the Native Americans? Yet there they were, mutually thankful for their survival.

Forget for a moment the harried race to get more, faster, and better. Appreciate the genius who figured out that cranberries could be jellied. Taste the recipes of generations. Stop. Focus on the smells and sounds and be thankful if you can.

Reach across the table of life to those who are different and find your common points of gratitude.

And may you have a happy, blessed Thanksgiving Day.

Denver with a side of Murphy

Murphy, that invisible magician-of-all-that-can-go-wrong, has me in the cross-hairs.

Last week, I went to a conference in Denver. I had never been to Denver before, nor had I ever been to this particular conference. I packed carefully, almost obsessively. At the last moment, I went to pack my laptop. My bag wasn't where I usually left it. Then again, my usual place changes periodically and I wasn't sure what the usual place du jour was. I searched the house. Ah-hah! Found it in my son's old room. It wasn't until I was on the plane, departing Dallas, that I realized it was my son's computer bag, not mine, and the white cord in the side pocket was not – as I had thought – my phone charger, but rather the cord to a camera that no one in the family has any more. And my phone was down to a 30% charge.

"Oh well," thought I, chalking one up for Murphy, "I'll just pop into a store in Denver and buy another one."

My friend Jody met me at the airport in Denver; he had flown in earlier in order to visit with his sister, Shannon, before the conference. We drove straight to the conference hotel from the airport in order to enjoy the opening ceremonies. It was late by the time we made our way in the rental car over to Shannon's house, where we were staying. I plopped my suitcase down on the bed in the room I was to use, and pushed a cat out of the way. The cat ignored me and returned to his spot.

A second cat walked into the room. I love cats, so I just unpacked around them. That was when I realized I had forgotten to bring any socks or hose for the conference. "Oh well," thought I, shaking my head, "I'll just get some more when I get the phone charger." And I shooed the cats out, shut the door and climbed into bed.

About thirty minutes later, I climbed back out of bed, opened the door and conceded to the cats that yes, indeed, they had been there first and begged them to please, please come on in and stop that incessant yowling.

The following afternoon (after a truly fantastic day of Murphy-free workshops), Jody and I left the conference hotel to return to Shannon's, intending to stop at a corner drugstore somewhere along the way.

Let me say right now that the people of Denver are amazingly nice to strangers. In the course of four days, only one person honked their horn at us as we zigzagged through the streets trying to get our bearings (and I secretly suspect that person was also from out of town.) But that day, in our search for a drugstore, we took a wrong turn. Next thing we knew, we were cruising streets with taverns, tattoo parlors and not a single drugstore. We passed gas stations, massage parlors, a couple of D-list fast-food joints and one place that might have been a tiny brothel or a nail salon with a twist. I couldn't tell.

As I tried to figure out the GPS system in our rented car, Jody turned into what appeared to be an industrial district. Two men in hard-hats were leaving a building. One seemed to be heading for the parking lot on the opposite side of the street. With a mighty swerve, we screeched up to the sidewalk just before the man could step down. I reached out to lower my window and ask for directions – and accidentally hit the lock. Click! All four locks shot down. I tried the window again. It didn't move. "I'll get it!" said Jody, determinedly hitting a button on his side of the car. The windows did not budge. Nor did the startled man we had hoped would rescue us.

I glanced at Jody and realized the button he was punching was the child window lock. At that, we both collapsed in laughter, Hard Hat man began inching away from our car, and we decided that the better part of wisdom was to beat a hasty exit.

If you ever hear a Denver factory worker tell of the day he narrowly escaped two lunatics in a rental car, please tell him we're sorry.

In the absence of drugstores, we settled for a Family Dollar store; no phone chargers, but I got some hose for the next day. "I'll try again tomorrow," I thought.

The next day once more failed to yield a drugstore. A friend at the conference had the same type of phone as mine, and offered to charge it for me. Score one for me. That night, as we drove the streets of Denver trying to find a restaurant we'd been recommended, we passed drugstores. And phone stores. And electronics stores. Phone chargers galore were in reach, but I no longer needed them - so instead, we accidentally entered the on-ramp to a freeway, during rush hour, and found it impossible to get back off for several miles. When we finally did exit, we found ourselves at the county jail. Score another one for Murph.

After the conference ended, Jody stayed at his sister's a little longer and I took off for the airport. Security was relatively quick. I found some lunch, settled into a chair in the waiting lounge and congratulated myself on how smoothly things were going. Spotting a man from the conference, I waved and called, "Hi Michael!" No response. He was busy talking to the woman beside him – and she wasn't the one he'd introduced as his wife at the conference. I quit waving. 

A little later, as I wandered the lounge, I saw them coming toward me. "Oh well," I thought, "None of my business who he's with," and I made my smile warmer and my wave even more direct. The man turned. It wasn't Michael after all. His wife caught sight of my enthusiastic hello and turned a scowl on the hapless man.

Beating another hasty retreat, I took refuge in the ladies' room.

If you happen to hear a man who looks like Michael tell of the overly friendly stranger who got him in hot water with his wife at the Denver airport, please tell him I'm sorry and that it's really not my fault. 

It's just that I'm stuck in Murphy's cross-hairs.

Diaspora

We came from all points on the compass: North, West, South, and even East (by less than 25 miles, but it still counts). Our hair was a little more grey or a little more absent; we had a few hitches in our getalongs. Most of our children came as well, some with their own children. A few couldn't make it: we missed them. We came together to celebrate our parents and each other and all that came to be because 60 years ago, our parents embarked on the great adventure of "I Do". And it occurred to me that no one truly knows what they agree to when they say those two little words.

My parents had already decided on four children, and Dad even predicted our birth order correctly. But that's about all. They didn't know, standing there in that church, that Dad would someday impress our tribal hosts by improvising a fishing "net" out of his t-shirt (long story). Or that Mom would learn to make mashed plantains as good as any made by the local Tsáchila women. They could not have foreseen our menagerie of pets that included a monkey, a parrot, a sloth and a kinkajou. (Actually, the sloth was terribly boring; I'm not sure he counts as a pet.)

I'm positive they had no clue how many ways a boy could need stitches: in one summer, Paul fell out of a tree against a barbed-wire fence, split his finger with a rusty wheelbarrow handle and caught a fishhook in his thumb. They didn't know that Steve would elevate practical jokes to a fine art (ask him sometime about a certain statue.) Or that Becky – the quietest of us all – would venture furthest from home, moving to Australia for several years.

I know for a fact that they never imagined their youngest would want a pet tarantula. But they let me keep him anyway.

In fact, they said "I do" to a lot of things, including our childhood. We dug caves in the hillside, swam in jungle rivers, made little "huts" in the tall weeds that grew in the pasture next to us. When I wanted to be a ballerina, Daddy built a practice barre in my room – even though we were miles from any school and I had absolutely no talent. When Paul burst into the house ecstatic over his "friends", Mom went out and knelt in the dirt beside him for an introduction to his new-found buddies, the leaf-cutter ants.

They said "I do" to things they didn't want to, like sending their children away to school. By the time I was six, correspondence school was available and I stayed home to study. After sixth grade, Mom and Dad gave in to my pleas to send me to boarding school with my siblings; I didn't realize the pain they felt because I was the last one, and they deeply missed my brothers and sister, and if I left also, the house would be too empty too soon.

But this weekend, we all came back to fill their house again. We swapped stories, and it was good to see that nothing essential has changed over the years. We still find the same word plays funny. We can finish most of each other's memories. When I was little, I loved C.S. Lewis' Narnia series (still do.) I used to compare us to the Pevensie children, except that my siblings were Steve the Wise, Becky the Calm, and Paul the Intrepid. They still are, but they have more layers and dimensions than I could have known back then. (Considering how often I tattled on them, it seems the better part of wisdom not to ask what name they would have given me.)

Every so often, we even told a story that our children hadn't already heard.

The grandchildren added their own stories. As I sat and listened to my nephews and nieces, it occurred to me that when my parents slid those rings onto each other's finger, they also said "I do" to the physical therapist, the nurse, the engineer, theater director, wildlife conservationist, anthropologist, musicians, and who knows what else over the years.

And later, as I watched their children play - the fourth generation - I found myself wondering where their paths would lead. What will they reflect upon when their own family diaspora gathers someday, when they're a little grey, a little worn?

I don't know. All I know is that wonderful things happen when someone has the guts to take Mystery in hand and say, "I do!"

Standing on Dignity, Resting on Laurels

I work with words. I also teach other people to work with words. Twice a year, I hold an 8-week (Saturday mornings only) introductory class for people interested in spoken-language interpretation. Along with the basic modes and techniques of interpreting, I stress ad nauseum the idea that language is always in flux, making it impossible for interpreters and translators to rest on their laurels and say, to quote George Lopez, "I got this."

Just think: in the past couple of decades "sweet" has come to mean "cool", but not the kind that is the opposite of hot. One can conceivably be both hot and cool and not even be talking about menopause.

"Bad" can be good but not virtuous, prompting some to say that it's "bad to be bad." Which would mean good. "Pimp" has become a verb and not necessarily a negative one; "sick" isn't; women can be foxes and cougars simultaneously, and few recall that once upon a time "making love" "pitching woo" and "courting" were all synonymous with flirting.

Along with changing language, court interpreters must recognize nuanced speech – lawyers use it heavily, especially with juries. Sometimes, I assign my students to pick a current event, and then read the stories published by opposing ends of the media spectrum. Their task is to de-spin the work of spin doctors, until they come up with non-nuanced texts. (The resulting stories are usually quite short.) And if my class contains individuals who are particularly inclined toward one political extreme or the other, this exercise often provides a good segue into the lesson on controlling emotions and bias while interpreting.

We must be prepared to follow changing developments smoothly. Unflappably, one might say. No words are morally bad. They may simply convey morally reprehensible or perhaps vulgar ideas. Screams, shouts, political incorrectness: nothing should shake the professional interpreter. A colleague once told me of a case he'd served on where the defendant, upon losing, chose to launch a series of invectives at the judge. The (very good) interpreter promptly let loose with the corresponding energetic string of profanity in English. After the courtroom was almost empty, the judge looked at my acquaintance and commented, "I know you were just doing your job – but you didn't have to enjoy it!"

At any rate, this is what I do. Whether translating at my desk or interpreting in a courtroom or deposition, words are my stock in trade and it is my job to keep up with changes in that stock. Calmly, smoothly, efficiently.

Life, on the other hand, delights in upending my smooth, efficient calm. There are times outside the courtroom when the subtle changes in language ambush me, and it's never pretty. When I was first dating John, we agreed to meet his mother for a quick bite to eat at Braums. (Besides the best milk around, Braums makes a pretty mean hamburger. Mean as in good, not average, stingy or heartless. Sorry, it's a word thing.)

I had only met his mother briefly once before and very much wanted to her to like me. As John and I stood in the parking lot, waiting for her to arrive, we snuck a few kisses, hugged, and laughed together – a lot. The moment her car pulled into the parking lot, though, I begged for a little decorum. John and decorum were not generally compatible. Still, for my sake, he tried.

One thing about conversation between John and his mother: they used a slightly different English than what I was used to. Some words seemed to preserve older meanings, unchanged in this little pocket of Texas. It was fascinating for a word person like me. So I listened with decorum and interest and tried hard to make a good impression.

It was all going so well. Then a sweet-faced elderly woman approached our table. Handing John a little card about friendship, she said, "I just had to come over to give you this and tell you that I so enjoyed watching the two of you making love in the parking lot..."

The noise suddenly got sucked out of the restaurant. Horrified, I glanced at John's mother. And at John. And at the smiling, elderly woman. My composure slid under the table and I wanted to follow.

Eventually, it registered that the other three were still chatting comfortably. My future mother-in-law was fully aware of the old meaning of the phrase. The only sign that anyone knew of my inner melt-down was the occasional twitch in John's shoulders as he held back his laughter.

I still have that little card. It's a good reminder that laurels and dignity are no match for real life.

Nickels and Pie

Sometimes my mouth opens up and makes promises all by itself while the rest of me listens, astounded. It then falls to said "rest of me" to figure out how to make good or else to plan a strategic retreat.

Last December, my granddaughters and two of their cousins came for what has become a tradition: the annual slumber party with Oma (aka me.) The discussion turned to cooking. Someone said wouldn't it be nice to have a visit where all they did was cook, and someone said they'd like to create their own recipes and someone said, sure, let's plan on doing that when school's out.

Since that last someone was me, my brain has been trying to figure out a) when, and b) what in the world made me think I could teach four girls to cook. My own children had mixed reactions: Adrian burst out laughing and Patrick asked me if I planned on teaching the girls how to remove food from the stove before it gets to the stage where I say, "Just scrape off the burnt part, it's fine underneath..."

They were being merciful. They could have brought up the Infamous Clam Chowder Incident, the one where Goofy Pooch took a sniff of the chowder and backed away in panic.

With school starting up again soon, time was running out. We made plans. Yesterday morning, two sets of parents delivered four eager young ladies to my door. My granddaughters, M (12) and S (8), along with their cousins, H (14) and B (12), dropped their bags to the floor and asked, "Where do we start?"

We started at a local farmers' market (M announced to her parents afterward, "I have now experienced a Farmers' Market, and they – are – not – air-conditioned!") It was fun watching the girls pick out fruits and vegetables. I found myself passing on produce selection sniffing-and-thumping tricks my mother taught me.

The evening's cooking session surprised the girls by yielding a very good beef stew. After supper, we made our regular trek to Half Price Books, where I gave the girls a small budget and set them loose in the store. They were so worn out when we got home that they fell asleep almost instantly.

This morning, they learned to make pancakes. They even learned how to improvise when you suddenly run out of flour because you haven't baked anything in so long that you'd forgotten you own a flour bin, much less that it needed restocking.

After pancakes, it was time for another favorite: Nickelrama, an arcade where every game runs on nickels and the machines are generous with tickets. I bought the girls each a cup of nickels and sat down to watch the fun. Kids of all sizes, ages, colors and shapes ran every which way. Game bells and alien ray guns rang through the air. Adults followed their respective kids around, sometimes in a slight daze. I watched a grandmother pump nearly $20 into a game, methodically winning tickets for her grandson to redeem for a $1.75 toy. One woman had brought her little one to the arcade for what appeared to be the first time: the girl (about 3 years old) stared around in wonder, threw her hands into the air and exclaimed, "I just don't... I just don't...I just don't KNOW!" I later saw them at the Sponge Bob game, so apparently she figured it out.

We had pineapple-glazed chicken for lunch and talked about the girls' upcoming school year and boys and hair styles. And somewhere around the time I figured out that the Great Cooking Weekend was really about strengthening ties soon to be tested by adolescence, it was time to make supper.

At 5:30, two sets of parents arrived to find signs on the door announcing, "Welcome" and "Parents, Come In". They were served lasagna, green salad, fresh fruit, garlic bread, "smores pie" and beaming smiles by four young ladies.

Maybe next time, I'll get to teach them the art of disguising slightly-charred biscuits. It can be done – I promise.

.

 

A Little Cracked by 50

I’ve been thinking about my friend Susie. When we started working for the same law firm in Quito many years ago, I was 21 and she was 46. Still, we became the best of friends and I couldn’t say if she was more of a mentor, a mother confessor or a second sister to me.

At the time we met, Susie had already survived the loss of her husband and twin sons, spent six months in a wheelchair, and undergone seven (yes, seven!) breast cancer surgeries, not to mention a host of “lesser” disasters in life. But at the slightest hint that an occasional bout of self-pity might be condoned, Susie would dismiss it with flick of her fingers and say, “It’s just stuff.” She had no time to wallow; there was life to be embraced.

The night before I left Ecuador, I went over to Susie’s for supper. She gave me a small plastic box shaped like a peanut and said, “Here – this won’t take up much room in your suitcase. But don’t open it until you get to where you’re going.”

Naturally, I opened it that night, in the car on my way home. Inside the plastic peanut was a little bean-filled baby doll with a note that read, “Friends always.”

The following year, Susie had an eighth breast cancer operation and shortly afterward, the cancer filled her stomach. She and her daughter, Carmen, flew up to M. D. Anderson in Houston for a second opinion. The doctors there confirmed the prognosis: 6 months at the very most. Susie was told to go home and prepare to die. Instead, she and Carmen came to spend a week of vacation with me.

Ignoring the medical timetable completely, Susie lived another 14 months. In September of 1985, I called to wish her a happy birthday; Carmen answered the phone instead and told me that her mother had died that morning. It was Susie’s 50th birthday.

I remember thinking that in 25 years I would be the same age. I hoped that by then I would have that kind of strength, that unshakeable faith in God, that dependable sense of perspective and absurdity. I wanted to give off that same aura of wisdom.

Well, Susie, here I am. I made it to 50 and, I must say, I’m a little disappointed.

When I look in the mirror, there is no mantle of elder-hood ready to descend around my shoulders, a physical manifestation of deep inner wisdom. There’s just some gray hair, artfully hidden by my friend Garnier.

Not that I haven’t learned a few things along the way. A few weeks after you died, Carmen gave birth to her second daughter and I found out I was expecting my first son. So I’ve learned the fierce joy and absolute confusion of being a parent and helplessly loving the children you want to invest with wings and ground for life.

I’ve had a bad marriage and a wonderful marriage, and learned the difference between the two.

I’ve learned about losing the person you want to grow old with, before you finish being young together.

I’ve learned that I will not die of embarrassment, work or frustration. And that some things, like chocolate, are both bad and good for me and I have to choose which price to pay.

I’ve learned that dreams don’t go away just because other things are more urgent.

I’ve learned that no matter how much I learn, it’s still just a drop in the bucket.

Last night, I was going through some old poems of mine, and came across one written at the ripe old age of 14. It ended with the line, “Memories are a friend and a bag of peanuts.”

I still have the little plastic peanut Susie gave me, although the shell is cracked. It should be – after all these years, I’m a little cracked in places, too. But I’m blessed with friends who are friends always, and maybe it’s alright that my mantle of elder wisdom has yet to come. Maybe I need to embrace my inner nut.

Or maybe I just haven’t yet gotten to where I’m going.

Requiem for a Goofy Pooch

Way back when Patrick and Adrian were little, we lived in an apartment. The boys wanted a dog. They begged, cajoled, whined and bargained for a dog. I conceded to hamsters instead, and promised, "We'll get a dog when we have a house." (We went through several hamsters, actually, before we moved into a house. They kept escaping, but that's a story for a different time and place: preferably, a confessional.)

Then, when the boys were seven and nine years old, we moved into the long-awaited house. The first day after the move, the requests for a dog began again. This time, I put them off with a vague, "When we find the right one."

About a week later, Arline called to say, "I have the right dog for you." Mind you, I hadn't told her the boys were holding my feet to the fire. But at the time, Arline fostered rescued dogs. And, unlike my boys, my friend knew my secret: I was afraid of any dog that stood much higher than my ankle.

"Is it very big?" I asked. "Not that big" wasn't the most convincing of answers, but Arline insisted I at least meet her, and the boys begged, and what's a girl to do when she's caught in a conspiracy of kids, friends and promises made? I went over to meet Charlene.

She seemed big to me. She was pretty: an unusual mix of Sharpei and Golden Retriever. She was also unmistakably afraid of me and almost anyone else over four feet tall. Somehow, that seemed less intimidating. A little while later, I left with my newly acquired pooch on the end of a leash. Charlene spent that first night trembling under my dining room table while I sat in the living room and talked to her. We each felt safer, in separate rooms with a forest of chair legs between us.

By the third day, we were both convinced that the other was harmless, and Charlene abandoned the safety of the dining room table. She was still terrified of grown men, though. If my dad or brothers came into the house, my silly dawg would make a beeline for my bedroom closet.

She was also afraid of storms, anything with a motor, and hamsters. One night, as Adrian lay on his stomach doing homework, Charlene spied the hamster ball rolling down the hall toward her. She did the most sensible thing she could think of: move to higher ground. In a split second, my 50-lb dog was perched, all four paws scrunched together, on my seven-year-old's posterior.

She loved our menagerie of animals, only threatening to drown the hapless critters in doggy slobber. When John came into our lives, Charlene threw her fear of men to the winds and fell in love with him. The first Thanksgiving after we married, Char snuck out of our yard and found a treasure fit for a king... the half-eaten turkey from a neighbor's garbage can. She dragged the carcass home and proudly laid it at her hero's feet. John made a fuss over her, then placed the gobbler remains in a double plastic bag and put it in our garbage. Charlene found it, stripped off the plastic bags, and returned it to John.

In fact, she was an accomplished escape artist. On my way back from work, it was not unusual to see a brown blur dash across yards and down alleys as she raced me home. The goofy pooch would hide beside the garage until I hit the garage door opener. Then she would run into the garage, turn around to face me, and pretend she had been there all along. About twice a year, she would escape for a day or two. This involved, at different times, chewing through a closed cedar gate, unraveling a chain link fence, and squeezing through impossibly small spaces. John called them her "walkabouts". We never knew where she went on walkabout, but she always came home looking very pleased.

When John moved in, so did Ginger. Charlene was fascinated. The little Jack Russell had energy to spare, barked at everything, but couldn't figure out how to get outside on her own. Eventually, they worked out a system: when Ginger wanted to go out, she'd bark; Charlene would get up, slap the sliding glass door open, and go back to what she was doing. (We never could get her to close the door.) The problem of Ginger's squeaky toys was less amicably resolved. Charlene very much disliked noisy toys. One day, she gathered them up and sat on them while she watched Ginger work herself into a tizzy of frustration. Years later, when we lost Ginger, Char mourned for a week. Then she dug up all of the doggy treats that Ginger had buried around the yard.

When John died, Charlene mourned for months. Every time my nephew drove John's old truck up to the house, her ears would perk up and she'd do her happy dance.

Of late, Charlene's daily walks have been shorter, her naps much longer. At 16 years old, her ailments finally gained the upper hand. So today - because we love her - Patrick, Adrian and I took our dear Goofy Pooch to the vet and said goodbye. As she slipped away on her final walkabout, I thought of how she let go of her fears in order to love life. I thought about how incredibly gentle she was.

And I thought that if one believes, as I do, that God's breath of life flows through all creation, then Charlene came from the breath that He caught in the midst of laughter.