New Year's Day 2009

I wondered, after I spoke to my mother on the telephone last night and wished her "Happy New Year," how many more annual turns of the calendar she will experience. I felt a twinge of guilt that I and my youngest son, who has been visiting from Houston for two weeks, could not easily make the time to visit her during the holiday season. She understood, she said, just as I understand that he has cut his visit home short by a few days for several logical reasons. I will cry, as I always do but try not to do, at his departure this afternoon, and I wonder if my mother has shed a tear or two of loneliness during the holiday hoopla.
Tricky, these emotions, as they conduct battle inside one's heart and mind, thus holding a certain power. They struggle for expression, and they will find it, one way or another, perhaps healthfully, perhaps not.
Instead of diving into this pool of vulnerability, my mother and I both chuckled when she said her friends and neighbors at Grandview Terrace in Sun City West, Arizona, had planned to ring in the New Year at 8:30 p.m., but "half of the crowd had already left."
Such is the life at a retirement home where I, at the age of . . . let's just say past 50, am often the baby in the crowd. Nonetheless, these residents keep busy with daily exercise, games and interest groups and as many trips and excursions as one cares to take. Even she, at 95 and finally having to carry a supply of oxygen to counteract her emphysema, plays bridge twice a week, takes the bus to the grocery store, walks to the dining room for her meals, and knits afghans for everyone she knows while her Burmese cat, Collette, snoozes in her lap. Safe subjects for discussion, all.
As I wonder about the rest, the subcutaneous whisperings, I keep coming back to the realization that today -- this first day of 2009, this moment -- as I write this blog, this is all I have.

Christmas Eve

The children are nestled all snug in their beds -- the children who are now adults, some of whom have children of their own. I have read one grandson and my only granddaughter "'Twas the Night Before Christmas," as my father did for me as a child, and as I have done for my children for every Christmas since their birth. I have served a meal of chili and hot chocolate to warm the body and the spirit. I have raised up my candle in church as we sang "Silent Night." I have wrapped the last gift and baked the last cookie. I have included the lonely, the grieving and the estranged in my celebration.
With consistent attention to my attitude and with reliance on my spiritual source, I have warded off any tendency toward Christmas blues. For the most part, I did not cave in to any anxiety I may have experienced as I wondered with whom and just how I would spend this Christmas Eve. By doing that, by living in the moment and by refusing to over-plan with high expectations of my own or of others, I enjoyed a loving, uplifting and pleasant evening.
This holy night of bringing light into the world has brought light into mine.

Happy e-holidays

I can justify my holiday greeting decision by saying that economic angst has all of us on edge, so we scrimp and save wherever we can, including the cost of postage.
I can justify it by saying I'm "going green," doing my part to protect the environment by saving trees.
I can justify it by saying that the age of technology has grabbed us by the throats, shaking us into sensibility.
No matter how I justify sending an e-greeting this year, even if personally written, I still don't feel quite right about it. Having grown up in a time when pen, paper, and postage stamps provided the only options for written communication, I learned the pleasure of sending and receiving letters in the mail. My mother carefully taught me the etiquette of the handwritten note, and as I grew up, she would not allow me to type a personal letter. Nothing personal about that at all, she would say. She probably was right (again!), for I still have letters I wrote to my grandmother as a child, sentimental keepsakes my mother saved for me. I can see how they might have made my grandmother smile and feel close to me, even though I lived far from her.
Speaking of my mother, even she, at the age of 95, will read my holiday letter on her computer. Kicking and screaming, she bought one a few years ago. All resistance aside, she enjoys e-mail jokes from her friends, and she chats with me online almost every evening.
Happy e-holidays.

Making music

In the first of my lifetime careers, I made my living by writing. I still make part of my living by writing. Sometimes I allow myself to think I have some talent.
Then I get humble when I recognize real genius, which I experienced today with Handel's Messiah.
Handel composed his choral masterpiece in less than a month. For centuries, musicians and singers around the world have performed it. Today a friend and I participated in a Messiah "sing-along," an annual event in North San Diego County, as it is in many communities around the country. Whenever I have the opportunity to sing it, I do, admittedly relying extensively on the strength of more fully trained altos to create the essence.
As the program began with the first tenor assurance of "Comfort Ye," I felt a sense of peace come over me. It lasted throughout the celebratory "Hallelujah Chorus," which swept me into its joyful Scriptural promise. My friend with whom I shared the experience does not believe the Scriptures. Her spiritual life revolves around pagan beliefs and love of Mother Earth. Still, as a musician herself, she appreciates the music for the sheer emotional magnitude of it and for the fact that it calls to pleasant memory the times she has sung it with her sisters and their late mother.
Hallelujah for this day! Hallelujah for this talent!

Pillow Book thoughts

My brain has checked out for the most part. My eyelids feel a bit heavy. Thus, I'm going to borrow Sei Shonagon's model in her fascinating glimpse into imperial court life during the Heian period of Japanese history, The Pillow Book. In it, she makes lists of her likes and dislikes, discloses gossip-like tidbits of her surroundings, offers no-holds-barred opinions, and invites her readers into the little known workings of the court.
Tonight, in the brisk waning hour, I work slowly and clumsily at my task, but I can make a Pillow Book list.
What I Loved Today

• Looking out across my school campus to the ocean, which reassures me every day.
• Coming home early to a festively decorated home.
• Writing notes of thanks to friends and colleagues who have supported me in trying times.
• Chatting with my 95-year-old mother online about letters I had written to my grandmother as a child.
• Watching the surf sparkle in the moonlight.
• Laughing at Lolo, my Tonkinese cat with immense blue eyes, as she somersaults through the kitchem, tossing her catnip toy.
• Reflecting on friendships near and far.

Simplify!

While on this Thoreau jag, I need to apply his advice -- "Simplify! Simplify!". Having had a yesterday that spun out, I did not allow myself to fit in my commitment to write every day. I realize that an examination of priorities is in order. I could have skipped my Facebook check-in. I could have skipped a game of Spider Solitaire. I could have cut five minutes off my nap. I could have completely avoided participating in job politics.

I did not run out of time; I mismanaged it.

The God-moment of the spinout day came as I drove home from work. On the freeway heading east on a bright California winter afternoon, I noticed the nearly full moon. To borrow a line from Stephen Crane's Red Badge of Courage, the moon looked "pasted in the sky like a wafer."
Dimmed in the daylight, it provided a promise of brilliance once darkness came. Hope. Promise. Beauty. Simplicity.

More Thoreau

Perhaps I took a bit of a risk by alluding to "size isn't everything" in a room full of adolescent testosterone. I couldn't help it. As we continued talking about Henry David Thoreau's "Battle of the Ants," I remembered Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself 31," quoted here:

"I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey work of the stars.
And the pismire is equally perfect, and a grain of sand and the egg of the wren
And the tree-toad is a chef-d'oeuvre for the highest
And the running blackberry would adorn the parlors of heaven,
And the narrowest hinge in my hand puts to scorn all machinery
And the cow crunching with depress'd head surpasses any statue
And a mouse is miracle enough to stagger sextillions of infidels . . ."

When I read it to them and explained that a pismire is an ant, I swear I could hear I collective groan. "Can't she get over the ants?" the groan seemed to say. When I told them that Whitman's whole transcendental point is that "size isn't everything," at least I had their attention.

I love Whitman. I want them to love Whitman, and maybe some of them will. That's why I keep teaching.