Champ is happy to nap just about anywhere, but his favorite spot is under our apple tree. Sometimes he even puts his head up and barks at stuff, but only if it’s really important stuff.
Happy Snap: Serving Suggestion
October 1, 2011 By 4 Comments
Without the helpful Serving Suggestion on the packaging, Edna would never have discovered her now-famous recipe for “Blue Bowl Sugar a la Wooden Spoon.”
Edna’s Up To Something
September 28, 2011 By 2 Comments
Edna often baffles me… but no more than I do her.
After I left her alone yesterday, the plot thickened: Edna dug out her secret weapons – The Dueling Singers – and put them to work.
Undaunted by reverse-refusing machines, Edna pressed onward.
“I never did like going backwards.”
Edna’s trusty assistant kept vigil for weather and other hindrances to her progress.
“Miss Edna,” I whined, “it isn’t working!”
“Of course not, dear,” she smiled,”you need a bigger hammer.”
Edna believes that you are never too old for purple eye shadow and that no mission is complete without some sparkles.
“It’s lovely. What is it?”
“It’s a magic book of recipes & maps — ideas for your journey.”
“But… it’s empty.”
“Well, how was I supposed to know where you’d be going?”
Plotting and Planning
September 27, 2011 By Leave a Comment
To the untrained eye Edna’s plot to take over the world appeared quaint, but she’s a crafty one, that girl.
Gina’s Reading: Clock Winder by Anne Tyler
September 14, 2011 By Leave a Comment
I love, love, love Ladder of Years, so I was really looking forward to another visit with Anne Tyler. I have a stack of her titles — Clock Winder and Patchwork Planet among them — and somehow landed on the former.
Hmmm. I love Anne Tyler. And there are absolutely entire sections of this book which were flawlessly written. However–and this is a huge however–there were 3 or 4 chapters which were completely baffling and confusing and even hard to follow.
Most of the narrative involves Elizabeth–from her perspective and over the course of weeks. But in those 3 or 4 chapters you jump time and perspective. The narrators are drawn from minor, previously barely-mentioned characters–so their suddenly being front and center made for a strange adjustment. I had to re-read the beginnings of these chapters multiple times to figure out what was going on and who these people were. Then to be further vaulted into a completely different time period–sometimes several years later–simply added to my befuddlement.
Okay–then the real kicker–in the final chapter, she not only changes time and perspective, she changes Elizabeth’s name–in conversation as well as exposition–to Gillespie! Sigh.
I wanted to love it. I didn’t.
Ten Years and Forever
September 11, 2011 By 2 Comments
There’s something about those frozen-in-time events that we share. The ones where we all immediately recall where we were when they happened; when we heard. They somehow encapsulate a moment into this immutable snapshot that we carry and share and reflect upon when other milestone moments occur.
Ten years later, life is very different for me and the concrete contrast of the content of that day and this one causes me to reflect on more than the shared experience of Nine Eleven.
So, I remember.
I remember that I was driving from my home to my therapist’s home office on a sunny Tuesday morning. I was listening to the radio and the host was making some crack about how bad a pilot has to be to crash into a 110 story building. Todd Ethridge cut in to say something like, “Dude. That’s not funny. We don’t joke about stuff like that.” I love Todd — he’s a good guy who, at the time, was fronting a band called the Throwbacks. We’d go see them perform 80s covers whenever they played. It was one of the few things the wasband and I continued doing together as our marriage fell apart.
And that’s how the memories go. It’s never linear. Each moment pulls a thread of narrative that leads you to memories you’ve left boxed up for a decade.
I continued driving and learned that it wasn’t a small plane — as originally thought — but a commercial jet. Such a tragic accident. How awful for those families…
And then there was the second one.
I arrived at pj’s and a man was waiting outside — oblivious to the most recent information. I blurted, “They’re bombing us with our own planes!” We exchanged a few sentences about what was happening before he rushed to his car to turn on the radio.
pj had been in sessions all morning and didn’t know what was happening outside, on this gorgeous September morning. How do you break that sanctuary — in this dark, quiet office where you come for respite and healing and to look at the hard parts of your existence? I somehow did.
And so it went.
I emerged from that space to the horror that two more planes were down. And then there were the reactions and the overreactions, if you can overreact when planes with real people are being crashed into buildings with real people. The rumors about gas lines being shut down, more planes, poisoned water supplies, and on and on spread. I ignored them. Some members of my larger family talked about stocking up and going to our mountain retreat. I ignored them, too. I was scheduled to speak at a conference in Nashville and decided to take my family with me.
Decisions. Lots of worry. Lots of wondering. Lots of news, until I picked Berns up from preschool. I did not want him to know or see or hear this horror. Gillian was only 6 months old. She wouldn’t remember this day, and I somehow hoped it wouldn’t become a part of her childhood that colored things in heathers.
If I had an album from that week it would have images of the corner of Kingston Pike and Smith Road where I was when Todd shared the news, pj’s dark office, the smoldering field in Pennsylvania, the napping preschoolers, the gashed side of the Pentagon, the Volvo station wagon that became our refuge, the TVs everywhere with those planes hitting the towers and those towers falling again, my tiny children sequestered in a room, the conventioning news editors scrambling to get out of Nashville and back to their posts, the banquet hall filled with service coordinators who chose to listen to me when they were feeling the pull of the news, the people jumping from those buildings, the full Maxwell House hotel, newsprint flags, the drive from Knoxville to Nashville and back, the firefighters and the priests and the police officers and the smoke, the empty Opryland Hotel, the depressed rescue dogs who were trained to find life in that rubble, the first airplane overhead after days of silence.
The insult and miracle in grief is that in spite of cataclysmic loss, we carry on. We count the days and recount the events, but we carry on. We promise to change and honor and unite, yet we carry on. The moment becomes encapsulated and part of our memory forever, and we carry on. It’s been a day. It’s been a week. It’s been a month. It’s been a year. It’s been a decade. It’s been a lifetime. It’s been a millennium.
We mark the time. We carry on.
Good Ole Champ Dioge
September 9, 2011 By 1 Comment
I love this dog. He’s a good, good boy.
He’s also very, very sick. That episode back in June was a symptom of something bigger.
It may be neuro-distemper. It may be the neurological implications of a genetically sensitive collie being given Ivermectin for years.
It is likely a combination of the two.
I really have no words right now.
Lordy, I love this dog.
Gina’s Reading: Not Me by Michael Lavigne
September 7, 2011 By 1 Comment
Michael Lavigne’s debut novel, Not Me came into my consciousness during lunch at Patsy’s with Ned Andrew’s Aunt Joy. Aunt Joy truly is a joy and lunch with her is worth a 2400 mile round trip drive. If I had the time, I’d even be willing to walk it.
Anyway, she’d recently read the book and couldn’t say enough about it — how stirring it was and how it made her think, really think about some things. She did warn me that there were sections in the book that were very graphic in their descriptions of the Holocaust, saying, “Gina, I had to turn some pages very quickly.” Knowing how well-read this octogenarian is, I jotted down the title and promised to look for it.
Fast forward a couple of days. Ned Andrew and I were at our favorite bookstore — the Bookloft in Great Barrington — and among the stacks, I spotted a copy of Not Me. I added it to my embarrassingly tall stack of titles, evoking the strongest of defenses to my wise-enough-not-to-say-anything-out-loud husband, “Aunt Joy told me I had to read this.”
Even so, I wasn’t sure I could. I do have a special place in my soul for Holocaust literature, but there are only so many gruesome accounts I can read and maintain my sanity. When we got home, I tucked into a bookcase for “later.” Well, after my shameful treatment of Bel Canto I felt like I needed to do some literary penance and gingerly selected Lavigne’s book from the shelf.
Whew.
This book blew me away. Admittedly, I read it very, very quickly. In 2 days, to be exact. But I didn’t rush through any of the pages as Aunt Joy suggested I might. The basic premise is that comedienne Mickey Rose aka Mikey aka Michael Rosenheim goes to be with his dying father only to be handed a box of journals. The journals tell a very different history of Heshel Rosenheim than Michael has ever heard before. His father — reputedly a Holocaust survivor and tirelessly faithful Jew — may have actually been a Nazi officer who stole a Jewish identity at the end of the war.
The present day scenes are utterly realistic and set in familiar-to-me Palm Beach County, Florida, (though Lavigne insists on calling it “West Palm Beach County” for some reason) which immediately made me feel like I was in a safe space. This helped as the stranger and more disturbing elements of the story ripped me from my moorings. I appreciated Lavigne’s careful building of Michael’s current reality in a book where the historical detail is so heavily researched and crafted.
The historical sections are beautifully written, though gruesome — as they should be. Heshel’s narrative of the past (told in third person, so you’re not sure whether they’re truth or fiction) delve into some of the more horrific aspects of Nazi Germany, seething prejudice, and the results of the dehumanization of an entire population. Just when you think you are beyond the worst of it, Heshel moves on to the battles to establish Israel within Palestine. There is no respite here.
The whole journey is woven together in a compelling back and forth between the two time periods. Lavigne manages to maintain the pacing throughout and offers some sweet pauses among the more disturbing stories.
If I had one complaint — and I do — it was Lavigne’s insistence on the overuse of similes in Michael’s narrative. They are littered around the book like pizza boxes the morning after a frat party. I actually started to read the following sentence out loud to Ned because it was so well said… until I hit the “like” and then I just groaned.
I stepped out into the parking lot and a herd of mosquitoes instantly materialized on my arms and neck, like pigs around a trough.
Oh well. It’s probably only bothersome to me. The ever-amazing Michael Chabon uses similes, too, but I get irritated with him because he’ll pick some seventy-five cent word and use it eleven times in the same book. The first 2 or 3 times, it shows how clever he is. The next half dozen or so demonstrate that his editor loves him too much to say anything. Ah, but that’s for another Wednesday.
In the balance, the book is a thinker. It poses some pretty deep challenges to our assumptions about good and bad and evil and redemption and identity and guilt and family and forgiveness and horror and empathy. I don’t know that it offers answers, but I wasn’t expecting them.
Thanks, Aunt Joy, for the suggestion. I can hardly wait for our next lunch date. Get us a table and save me a slice!
Gillian’s Orchid
September 6, 2011 By 2 Comments
My ten-year-old daughter earned the nickname “Diva Princess” when she was less than a year old. We often say that either one of them alone was not enough of a title to capture this kiddo’s amazing personality.
Well, the Diva Princess has had her eye on an orchid for months and months. We kind of waited to see if this interest would last. I mean, seriously, what 10 year old wants a plant?
Gillian, The Diva Princess wants a plant.
So, in honor of Self Care Day, I splurged and let her pick one out.
She took about 30 minutes to make her choice and eventually landed on this glorious white phalaenopsis. She’s got great taste, no?
(No one tell her that I’m going to enjoy it just as much as she does.)
Celebrating the Launch of Self Care Day on the 6th
September 6, 2011 By 7 Comments
The first time I recall ever hearing “Self Care” mentioned was a little over 10 years ago. I was sitting in my therapist’s office, exhausted, depressed, and hurting all over. I had just given birth to the Diva Princess, been handed two diagnoses within a month of one another — autism for Berns and lupus for me — and was worn down to the nub from giving every ounce of energy, love, and attention to the needs of a newborn, her still-a-mystery-to-me brother, and their spiraling-from-the-weight-of-it-all dad.
As I sat in pj’s office venting all that was pissing me off, weighing me down, and breaking my heart, she said something to me that might as well have been whale song.
“Gina, you are going to have to take better care of yourself. You have to sleep. You have to eat. You have to go to the doctor. Your kids need a mother who is strong and you can’t be strong if you don’t do some self care.”
Self care?
I suppose I gave her my best golden retriever head cock, because she went on to say, “Yes. Self care. It is not selfish to keep yourself alive, healthy, and happy.”
Wait. What?
Luckily pj was a font of patience and walked me through the fog of self-denial into some pretty painful self awareness and on out the other side. I did a whole lot of work in those five (five!!) years of therapy with her. But it all really started with my nails.
Two Years Later…
I didn’t say this happened quickly.
While we were in Florida at the end of my father-in-law’s life, I went with one of my favorite people on the planet — my sister-in-law, E — to wait with her while she had her nails done. While I was sitting there, I decided that, heck, I could get my nails done, too. It had been a couple of years since I had and it was always for special occasions like a wedding or prom. I suppose I rationalized that a funeral was a pretty special occasion. Regardless, I got my nails done. I felt 72% more beautiful. Sure, it’s silly, but it was true.
So, I kept getting them done. Every 2 weeks for the next 6 years I went in for my manicure — an act of pure selfishness. No one benefited from this activity but me. Just me. All me. It was revelatory. It was an act of self care and it was the beginning of my taking myself seriously.
So Now…
As a coach and friend, I’m often “giving permission” to people to take care of themselves. Sure, there are a cadre of narcissists out there who do nothing but care about themselves, but most folks are pretty giving. And a certain segment of folks were taught that anything they do for themselves is immoral and selfish. They’ll drop everything to race across town at the slightest indication that someone neeeeeeds them, but they won’t walk across the room to meet their own needs.
Well enough of that!
As Joyce Rupp would say, “You can’t pour from an empty cup.” So, it’s high time you started refilling yours. And now there’s an official day to do it — the 6th of each month. Why the 6th? Because the idea came to be when we were talking about the facebook games about breast cancer, and I do my monthly self exams on the 6th (it’s Berns’ birthdate).
As I said when this thing popped into existence as a fully-formed idea, urged on by Page and CG:
I am — as the winner of the Internet (see: Bacon Klout) — declaring the 6th of every month Self Care Day.
What does that mean? It means that we’ll remind one another to take good care of ourselves on this day. You know, perform your self-check (skin & moles, breasts, etc), make your dentist appointment you’ve been putting off, get a massage, take a nap, start a class, clean the slate, laugh, polish your nails, or whatever it is you do that nurtures you.
It’s officially official, so there are no excuses big enough to put you and your health on the back burner any more. I’d love for you to share your Self Care Day activities in the comments.
I anticipate future posts about specific kinds of self care, how folks are observing the day, the Self Care Day T-shirt launch, the app, and the commemorative bracelet charm. Or maybe I’ll just be satisfied knowing that the folks I love are taking better care of themselves.
Either way, pretty please take really good care of yourself. It is not selfish to keep yourself alive, healthy, and happy.
It’s your job.
your thoughts