B

Mark and I were talking yesterday about the tattered condition of Shannon’s passport, his only form of id since he lost his driver’s license years ago. Mark said the passport is “like B,” which made me laugh uproariously. B was Shannon’s baby blanket, a gift to him as a newborn. It started out snowy white, with pale green satin edging. But it became baby Shannon’s most reliable solace, accompanying him everywhere, held next to his cheek as he fell asleep each night. Leaving B behind was not done, ever. Triple checks were made to ensure B was securely on board when we took road trips or flew to Indiana to visit Granny and Grandpa. Over time, B became gray and tattered, losing its satin edging. And B dwindled in size, shrinking to the size of a handkerchief, then smaller still to the size of a passport (hah!) and finally to the size of a postage stamp, at which point we convinced Shannon to part with B so we could put it away in a treasure box for safekeeping since it could so easily end up lost. Letting go of B was like Shannon’s passport to eventual independence.

Famous Blue Rocker

Twenty-three years ago I was large with my first child in the middle of a hot, dry Colorado summer. I lay on the couch in our toasty little Martian Acres home and tried not to moan too loudly; friends stopped by with white chocolate ice cream and words of comfort. The baby had stopped doing somersaults in my womb a few days ago and was now just writing his name on the wall every now and then – it was becoming increasingly apparent that, improbable as it might seem, he would be expecting to emerge soon through a very small aperture somewhere down below and currently out of my direct line of view.

My Mom had flown in from Indiana to lend moral support, and on the official due date of July 4 she, my husband and I drove up to Brainard Lake to allow me to gaze at the cool Arapahoe Peaks and lumber slowly along a path by the water, hoping the baby would be shaken and stirred into action. But the due date seemed destined to come and go with no trip to the hospital. That evening my brother came over to have dinner with all of us and later that night set off some very loud fireworks in the backyard. The sounds startled me into a hopping little tiptoe dance a lot like the dance of the hippos in Fantasia – and this is finally what did it. Later that night my water broke.

I sat quietly in the big blue rocker, waking no one yet, and timing the contractions. When they were 5 minutes apart, I woke up my husband, who blearily drove my Mom and me to the hospital along the previously agreed upon backstreet route, not that there was any traffic at 3 in the morning. In the hospital parking lot my husband and mother got out of the car and strode purposefully toward the ER, belatedly realizing I was moving kind of slow at the junction and hurrying back to hold my elbows and help me inside.


The legendary and fabulous OB-GYN nurses at Boulder Community sized me up, and then gave me a stern talking to – to get to 10 centimeters dilation I would have to walk. And up and down the halls I hobbled to keep the contractions going and get myself to the point where I was ready to deliver the baby. The doctor didn’t come until right before delivery time – but there were lots of jokes about this particular physician and his preference for the “little brown stool” he sat on during delivery. With my husband’s coaching and my mother’s quietly reassuring presence, I did the Lamaze breathing and was able to refuse the drugs. Many long hours later, around noon, our beautiful son was born, his alert little eyes looking right up at us in amazement we surely shared.

I only learned later that my husband had nearly gone into full crisis mode during the delivery. The doctor, ensconced on his little brown stool, had determined that the baby was head down as desired, but facing the wrong way, and had used a suction cup device to help pull our baby through the birth canal. When he pulled the suction cup off my son’s head after delivery, the red goo used to affix it looked like blood and my husband thought the top of the baby’s head had come off. In a few seconds he realized that everybody else in the delivery room was still calm and happy; luckily we had been blessed with a healthy and hungry baby boy.

The next day my son and I returned home tired but triumphant, and I found great comfort in taking our first few naps together in the famous blue rocker. Happy birthday, Shannon!

The Existential Garage Sale Manifesto, Part 2

If you can resist the urge to acquire stuff you had no desire for before you woke up this morning, garage sales (existential and otherwise) can be a good way to simplify; you can unload unnecessary stuff or obtain necessary stuff without feeling you’ve directly contributed to the stuff crisis. In fact, lots of little daily actions give me a small measure of well being in the face of the stuff avalanche: filling the small green biobags with egg shells, vegetable nubbins and coffee grounds and leaving them out in the compost bin for pickup; religiously recycling paper, plastic and glass each week; observing the ever-decreasing amount of actual trash we discard from our house each week as more of it goes into recycling and compost; using the library or buying used books rather than new ones where possible; resisting purchase of plastic crap, or stuff over packaged in plastic crap; reveling in the clean, peaceful look of a room with a few beautiful things in it and no clutter; walking and riding buses instead of driving, and retaining the job with the 7-minute commute.

But of course the guilt trip is alive and well: for two people we use way more electricity than seems humanly possible—no doubt too many devices are on all the time despite their stand-by modes; lights are left on to lend some psychological security at night; juice flows to keep the icebox cold and the hot tub hot (not luxury, but medical necessity to deal with neck and back pain after sitting too long in front of the electricity sucking computers). Always the tradeoffs.

The Existential Garage Sale Manifesto

I walk through Sobo (South Boulder as the cognoscenti call it) this Independence Day morning. On Ash I encounter a small garage sale with a difference. A brown cardboard sign is posted with the Gothic lettered title: Existential Garage Sale

In very small black hand-lettering beneath is a lengthy diatribe on how we all have way too much stuff, how we have multiples of stuff we don’t even need singles of, how we’ll all feel a lot better if we unload some of our stuff and find ways to reuse the stuff we have. How stores like Target are filled with unnecessary stuff like many brands of toilet paper when it would be better to have one superior brand of toilet paper and be done with it.

Two thoughts immediately occur to me: 1) Despite the fact that I already have too much stuff, I really must find something to buy at this garage sale to reward the creator for this unusual and timely sign and 2) one man’s superior toilet paper is another woman’s bathroom crisis; I remember an old friend’s trip to Poland several few years ago when she was told to take toilet paper with her because of tp shortages. Shortages of Toilet Paper! That’s deprivation.

In any case, I found a dog-eared and annotated $1 copy of Eudora Welty’s “The Optimist’s Daughter” to buy, and had a short conversation with the existentialist, a relatively young man. I complimented him on the sign, and he told me he had sold it to a guy for $100 and would be handing it over once he moved away. I gave him another $1 in tribute to the sign.

He said he was “trying to be a good socialist through capitalism.”

“Easier said than done,” I remarked in return, and we smiled at each other. Another fine day in Sobo.

Wearing Slacks in Ellettsville

I attended high school in the small southern Indiana town of Ellettsville. (You remember Ellettsville—I wrote a song about it). Back then, girls were not allowed to wear slacks in high school; it was Against the Rules. Don’t even ask about jeans—that would have really been pushing the envelope.

My 16-year-old heart was outraged at this injustice, especially in the dead of winter as I shivered waiting at the bus stop in my pantyhose and skirt uniform. One icy February morning I defied the rule, and wore a very nice pair of sea green tweed wool slacks to school. My father was called at work and had to come get me and bring me home to change. My mother, a teacher in the school system, was called on the carpet. Needless to say, my parents were not thrilled with my rebellion.

I also wrote a letter to the editor of the Herald-Telephone suggesting that in enforcing this rule the all-male school board was driven more by prurient interest than the best interests of female students, since they benefited from clear views of young girls’ legs in the bleachers at the gym during basketball games. The authorities remained unamused, and unswayed.

Oddly enough I never wrote a letter to the editor about another matter at the time. Abortion in even the first trimester was illegal and a girl that wanted one had to take a shady trip to Indianapolis and pay cash for a dangerous procedure rumored to involve coat hangers.

Now I watch events unfold in Iran. Courageous women and men face injury and death to stand up for their human rights. The Internet obligingly carries full coverage, and a young woman named Neda (whose name means “Voice” in Farsi) dies before our eyes. You have only to peruse a book like “Reading Lolita in Tehran” to see how much has been denied the woman in Iran since 1979—the right to wear what they wish, look as they wish, read and study what they wish, speak their minds, have their votes count, be who they really are. Mixed anger and admiration surge in my 56-year-old heart as I see their amazing bravery in the new Iranian revolution.

I just saw the absolutely marvelous new Pixar film, "Up." It has an elderly widower in it with black-framed glasses who reminds me greatly of my father in his last years. The theme of the movie, that every closed door results in another new one that opens--that the adventure is never over if you can let go of what you have lost--is uplifting. The animation and colors are marvelous. The love story at the beginning is very moving. See this movie!

The Slackline of Life

Yes you who must leave everything that you cannot control.
It begins with your family, but soon it comes around to your soul.
Well I've been where you're hanging, I think I can see how you're pinned:
When you're not feeling holy, your loneliness says that you've sinned.

"Sisters of Mercy" - Leonard Cohen

In any relationship, there can be such a precarious, hovering balance between feeling trapped and feeling abandoned. Walking life’s slackline and holding onto love for a lifetime, one must somehow be independent of the person who is loved, and yet remain connected. And the idea that you can control what happens to you is an illusion—all you can control is how you respond. So it boils down to a series of choices between love and fear—fear that the one I love will turn away from me or trap me; abandon me or take away my freedom.

You can only choose love over fear if you can find it in yourself to believe in love, and love can seem so ephemeral (“if you’re not feeling holy, your loneliness says that you’ve sinned”). I remember once many years ago a co-worker and friend of mine tried to talk to me about the “L” word--the central importance of love in all our lives. It was as if she spoke another language—I wasn’t ready to hear those ideas yet.

Fear and love aren’t opposites, but I think of them together; one is the answer to the other. Stuffing fear doesn’t work, it just creates a smoldering volcano of feelings. I do know that when I’m feeling emotional pain and I stop to focus on the present moment, accepting whatever I find in that moment, I am immediately more peaceful.

An interesting twist is that sometimes strong feelings of love generate fear in me—fear of losing what makes me most happy. My life partner creates beautiful flower gardens, and I’m torn between enjoying the beauty he’s created, and fearing a day when he may no longer be able to do it. In fact, when he was not well for awhile last year and the flowers went unplanted and untended, that was one of my greatest sorrows and my fear was reinforced.

When I struggle against the truth that nothing lasts forever and all things must pass, I feel fear and a terrible grief; I lose the present and the chance to enjoy what I do have. Remembering to be right here, right now and love the moment helps – “nothing that is real can be destroyed”—do I understand that idea finally?

For myself, the fear of abandonment is the greatest—I mould myself to fit the desires of the person I’m with “because it is easier,” I tell myself, but really because I am secretly afraid they’ll turn away from me given half a chance. In truth, even strong (and quite uncharacteristic) outbursts of rage on my part have resulted in shockingly few changes in other people. People change only when they are ready, not as a result of anything I do.

Love does have indirect influence—the presence of love, asking nothing in return, can bring peace and comfort to those around you—I remember this from parenting challenges with teenagers a few years ago. I have a feeling the biggest influence was my love for them, keeping the lines of communication open so that whatever else happened they knew I loved them.

The lessons all seem to weave together to make the pattern. The path is much more spacious each time I choose love, not fear.