Paint out the stars

2014 was a peaceful year.  I'm talking outer peace, not necessarily inner peace, but nobody's Facebook Sunrise Placard saying "outer peace is worthless without inner peace" is gonna change my mind:  a whole year low on personal tragedy, conflict, and anxiety is very wonderful, even while I am still processing a lot of unresolved and unexplained stuff, as well as loss.

Another funeral came into our lives, a friend of Dad's, and here's where I break a former promise ;  I was absolutely not going to talk about Episcopal church division anymore.  When I said that, it never occurred to me that I didn't know everything.  

My parents were so involved in this parish, such huge givers to, and supporters of, it that their names are on a plaque in the fellowship hall.  Seeing the blasted thing is like remembering something good that's lost.

Not just because I have lost them, but because the Episcopal Church in SC is torn, and it tore at them.

The church was foundational for them.  They freakin' met at the Episcopal university club.  They were serious about it.  They taught Sunday School (they taught teenagers! I mean, that's dedication), they led study groups, they served on Vestries and as Wardens, they served on search committees and Dad founded a group to feed hungry kids.

Then the denominational unity began to erode. They kept their marital unity together, love and hurt coexisting, but their Episcopal unity came to a painful and ragged end when the splitting process began.  Mom passed in 2010, and the official division wasn't till 2012, but their parish, with many other SC parishes, took preliminary steps in earlier years, and my folks were vocally and tearfully on opposite sides.

I wrote long ago that I would not attend that church after Dad was gone.  This funeral was my first service there since Dad's funeral in August 2013.

People came up to me repeatedly to tell me how much they loved my parents, and miss them, and I kept thinking,

Dear lady! what would happen to your heart if my mom had lived long enough to reveal the level of her anger over this church breaking with TEC?  You remember my "parents" as a church unit.  Like that plaque says.

These are good people.  I have no doubt that they would still love both my parents, and that they would, if technically, admire the integrity that Mom and Dad each had to stand up and be counted.

What really blew me away is that I don't think any of them know that the plaque honors only the past, a time dead and gone, a time when they were all in this together. 

I swore off of this subject years ago.  The problem is, I got some new information.

The 2012 split was (and is) big news in South Carolina.  Local papers interviewed people on both sides, lots of "feelings" journalism, and I read it all.

Then I wrote my own letter to the editor.

I told about my sense of loss, accused both sides of "cutting the baby in half," which, I said, left out in the cold those of us who can tolerate neither First Millennium science nor Third Millennium skepticism.

They printed my letter.

But I got a very interesting reply from a member of the local TEC church telling me I was misinformed.

I had assumed the parish my parents gave so much to for 27 years, the parish Larry and I were married in, had veered to the right with integrity;  that, though I disagreed with their beef and with the division, they were telling me solid, unambiguous truth about what TEC had done and said.

I'd sat through meetings with Dad, and read all the literature that came to the house.  So I wrote that letter based on the conservative Anglican sources, without doing my research, which is not like me.  And I got rightly put in my place.  Finally, I started doing some reading.  Duh.

TEC embraces a wide spectrum of views, from the symbolism-and-myth take on the Gospel story, to "credal" theology -- in line with the Nicene and Apostles' Creeds.   So far they are managing peaceful, if sometimes a little testy, coexistence.  An ability for all to freely jaw about interpretation, but worship together.

So, yes, they have not repudiated, defrocked, or excommunicated John Shelby Sponge (Yes, I know how to really spell it)  or others who call supernatural beliefs "baggage" we need to dump.  But the Apostles' and Nicene Creeds are right there in the "What we believe" section of TEC's website.

And in the current prayer book.

And the catechism, which is also right there in the new, annoyingly gender-neutral, most recent Book of Common Prayer, basis of every church service that we alleged apostates attend, is traditional creed theology.

Thing is ;  this love of tolerance is NOT NEW.  TEC has drawn a wide circle for well over a hundred years.  It has affirmed "reason" as well as the Bible and Tradition, as the "three-legged stool" it rests on, since Richard Hooker in the 17th century, yo.  I was raised in it and never, ever was taught to be a Biblical literalist.  Back then, only boys could be acolytes, women had to cover their heads.  As those things fell away, objections happened, but never rose to an Article of Faith, division level.

Later - o yes, different story.  Stricter Anglicanism expanded. 

But nobody accused TEC of outright apostasy.  The wide circle that TEC drew to include a spectrum of belief, right or wrong, has been around for decades.

So why did the breakaway Anglicans say that TEC denied the basic tenets of the faith?

I don't know.  I know that one of the strongest and most destructive temptations in life is the temptation to lie about "the enemy" because you sincerely believe people are in peril and must, must  be steered away from it and toward your own camp; the belief that if you need to lie to save lives, or, in this case, souls, you should do it.

I can only guess that the breakaway group is THAT concerned about people getting damned to eternal punishment for non-celibate gay relationships.

I can further only guess that they seriously think that TEC's support of gay relationships is deceiving people into unwittingly consigning their souls to Satan.

The anti-gay stance will neither fly in a court, nor with the public.

Is this why they've made a claim against TEC for something much more fundamentally wrong?  Or do they really think TEC has changed on the articles of faith?

Apparently, at the last TEC General Convention, some group called for a vote that "Jesus is Lord," and the vote was refused.  I first read it in a conservative newsletter, which railed, aghast, that TEC could not!  would not affirm Jesus' Lordship, OMG!

Trouble is, that all that affirmation is right there in the still intact catechism and creeds.  The vote was refused because it was redundant and would have been followed by a series of "Further, I call for a vote on [Atonement!  Authority of Scripture!  Marriage!  yadda yadda],"  grinding the convention to a halt.

At that funeral, I spent 2 hours with people my parents loved, and who loved them, and felt like I was hiding my own division from these breakaway supporters, just as I was hiding the division between my parents, hiding the fact that my mother would have opposed their vote.

This is a lesson in boundaries.  I need to embrace the lesson.  I did not choose this battle.

I think that if the general population of the breakaway group knew how TEC does and would gladly embrace their Creed-lovin' thought and beliefs, they would not want this split either, no matter what they feel about gay rights.  The gay question does not need to be settled to keep a denomination together, it only needs to be recognized as a lesser issue than the beliefs that are the church's basis.

They've split families, they've split friends, they've stripped off the letters.  Each church seems to have dealt with the "Well, we're not them, but we're Episcopal, but not really, but...." signage differently.

One way is to paint out the stars.

I hope sincerity is driving them.  I hope it is not Pride of the worst kind. 

Peace and happiness to everybody!

Having a quiet, simple celebration this year.  It's been a peaceful and good year. 

The treetopper came from my grandmother's home when she was young.  My guess is 1920's.  I always tuck it into the tree somewhere, but Spouse suggested using it as the topper this time, as it was intended.  I love it.  We did not put a bulb in that hole in the center.  We're doing low stress and don't wan to stress the star either.  8~)

Wishing a joyful turn of the year to everybody!

Red, white. Blue.

You knew this was coming, didn't you?

I've complained a lot about living here.  As we slowly empty the house to move to a place that's, in many ways, the inland home of our dreams, here I am.  Getting sad.

I haven't forgotten the minuses of living here.  Development is stripping away woods in every direction. The bike bridge brings tourists dumping trash, killing wildlife.  Thieves and intruders have become frequent.  Even as I took these photos of beauty I don't want to give up, the highway noise ground on and on, with varying pitches and decibels, peaking with motorcycle roars.

But living here was a gift from my parents.  It enabled us to survive this decade.  Their love for us is in these walls.

And our love for wildlife permeates this little patch of wood.  Larry especially has grown and nurtured the trees and garden, kept it chemical free, made it a haven for more birds than I can name, bees, garden spiders, dragonflies, little bugs of unknown name.  We've brought highway-trapped turtles here at least 8 times.  We've relocated more raccoons than I can count, 6 in an 8-day period last year.  The loss of woods has them crowded and seeking food, and we can take them to a couple different huge preserves.

We may not see a lot of those guys in the inland suburbs, though we did have a possum a few weeks ago.  8~)

Happy Fourth!

Still, I love the new house more and more.  We take boxes and unload, water plants, eat lunch, hang out, and it gets harder to leave there, but the cats are still here at the Inlet (moving them is a big worry), and we still need to be here to wrap things up.

Moving out of this Inlet house does not necessarily mean losing it.  We own half of it and it can't be sold to some twit who will clearcut to get a better view, without our OK.  Neither my bro. nor I can quite settle on what to do with it, but Larry and I put so much into it, the bond is there.

I bond with homes.  They shelter me and become inhabitants of my heart.

It's getting bare.  And after all my complaints, I confess, the sight makes me sad.

If you think global warming is not a problem

...then this guy we saw in the grocery store, whose cart I asked Larry to surreptitiously photograph (well done, love!), clearly knows something you don't.

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First

    What is unseen

     flows to what is unseen

     passing in part

     through what we partly see

          -  W. S. Merwin

Happy Flag Day

Feeling pretty fortunate today.  Have a good one.

Here comes money trouble

So in the past few months, an occasional news story has said food prices would rise, last year's drought being a major factor.  Lots of extreme weather and crop damage in 2013.

I read them and thought, yes, we'll be paying "more," a term that's a solvable problem when you're in the privileged class, and a crisis when you're trying to feed a family and make ends meet.

We have watched three different stores cut, and cut, and cut items we buy.  It wasn't one chain in trouble, it's all of them around here.  Fewer organics, fewer gluten free (purchased on a real MD's advice, so please, no lectures about how moronic the gluten-free "trend" is), less variety in general.

Today we hit our most-visited supermarket.  I was flabbergasted at the start, AND at the finish.

You'll need to enlarge it to read the price tabs.  I thought they were a mistake.  Seriously.  And they weren't.

I've bought these fruit juices, yes, organic and pricey, for several years for breakfast smoothies.  They've crept up from the 3.99 range into the 4.99-ish rage, and when I read about crop failures I must have thought they'd jump a full dollar (or gosh!  even more!).   But...??!  Not to nearly 10 dollars.  Tack tax onto that.

Nearly 10 dollars.

The store knows that's not gonna fly, and they've just started stocking a new brand, also organic, back down at 5.89, and I did buy it.

On we shopped, with our usual list.  Long ago we decided that healthier food was an investment that might keep us a little healthier, a little longer, as aging and higher disease risk started workin' their magic.  So for stuff we use most, we have not bought the cheapest options for a very long time.

We also do plenty of of regular, normal Big Food Industry products.   Each is a considered decision.  Organics are more important when they're something we consume a lot of.  I get organic juice in glass bottles, and not major non-organic brands in plastic bottles.  We do organic milk.

This is all to point out that our shopping doesn't change much.  So when we got to checkout and the total was

TWO HUNDRED FIFTY-NINE dollars, I was ......  I was......

I can't provide an item by item comparison.  We got two containers of whey protein, not one, and two magazines, but they don't explain this being about $80 more than I was used to spending for similar -- again, not identical -- but similar carts full.

This is unsustainable.  Partly for us, but we can adjust and comparison shop and work harder at it, but mostly for the economy.

Those brands in the photos can't stay in business if they have to charge close to 10 bucks for a bottle.

The substitute brand will supposedly have to raise its prices too, even if they manage to beat the competition.  I don't think close-to-$8, or close-to-$9, will sell much better than close-to-$10 does, and more shoppers will be over in the Big Food juice aisle, dropping spending back down, but to the standard brands' also-rising prices.

Families with budgets are already there in the Big Food aisle, where those higher prices will hurt them, badly.  Where will they get the extra money?

I'm liberal but I am not a progressive  (whole 'nother topic), and Mother Jones magazine annoys me way too often, but it does have some good information, and one column in the March/April issue was enlightening about SNAP buyers and how they stretch their dollars.

Don't get me started on the writer's defense of using SNAP money for junk food, which made me say very bad words.

So.  How much further can these buyers stretch it?

The crash of 2008 had analyses written about it ad nauseum.   One article I recall from very early in the crash pointed out that the trigger was the gas price jump.  Not that the mortgage debacle wasn't the root cause, not that the economy was healthy before that.  It emphatically was not.  But its plates could keep spinning in the air until those homeowners paying those absurd mortgages could no longer budget for them.  And that was the extra 30, 50, 100 dollars they had to put in their gas tanks every month.

That's what the article said, and, again, it wasn't the root cause, and multiple other articles haven't mentioned it (though I could have missed some) but it had to be a major factor.  The dollars of your income per month are the dollars of your income per month, even if filling your tank has jumped from $30 to $50.  I remember emptying my account to fill a Honda Civic's tank, and I know for sure a whole population getting hit that hard was unsustainable.

Here we are again.  Natural events may have jacked this basic budget item up, but how many families' budgets will tank this time, and can we do anything but batten down?

Normal things in life can still be crappy

Every afternoon, when Dad was here, I would come over and we would watch reruns of Bonanza on the old kitchen TV (which was my old 1991 TV, and which I still had in the basement and brought over for him when his TV quit).

"The Cartwrights are in big trouble.  I'm not sure they'll get out of this one," he would say with a mocking look of concern. "Oh dear," I'd reply, as though it were possible that the Cartwrights would succumb to any villain.

Today, for the first time, I am watching it in his kitchen without him, to occupy myself while estate appraisers go through every, and I mean, every item in my parents' house.   This was their life.   These were the things they used, and were given for their service in church offices, and collected, and cooked with, and listened to on the CD player, and decorated with at Christmas, and read, and remembered their own parents by.  Now it's all being inventoried for "fair market value" to value the estate, as estates must be valued.

It's what happens as each generation passes, and it's normal, and it's really crappy.   I'm trying to enjoy Bonanza but I miss Dad.

The joy of our vine-covered cottage...

O yes, we love this house, but you HAVE to control those lovely vines.

Here you see what they do and why they need regular chopp-  pardon me,  regular pruning. They'll work right up under your siding and slowly ruin it.  Roof shingles as well.

The ice storm caused a lot of headaches -- more photos to come -- plus there's regular maintenance like this, and it's good, satisfying work.  I like nurturing this nifty little house.

Why do these exist?

All right, I know why.  Because they are full of funny, interesting stuff, so people buy them and almost always as gifts.

Certainly not because they are even a little useful as information, organization, or any other function a calendar supposedly fills.

So.  Does anybody know how, exactly, I can get people to never give me a  #&^%$-ing  block calendar again?

I mean, without actually using Honest Communication and telling them?  

"I really hated your previous gift, but thanks SO much, but please never give me these annoying things again, okay?"

See, I like the content of all these.  They cover topics chosen well by people who know me and my tastes well, except for the  #&^%$-ing  fact that they are  #&^%$-ing  block calendars.

I have a hard enough time with my desk as is.  Its surface is small, it's always a heap of paper and bottle caps and dried up pens and stuff I periodically search through when something is missing, and there is NO room to dedicate to a block calendar, even if I did not need to leave additional empty desktop space in front of it to wrench off and throw away yesterday's cool and entertaining page to obtain today's date, which, for heaven's sake, who does that every single day anyway?!

The content works better as a little book, to use not as a source of calendar information, but for reading a bunch, or all, of the jokes in one sitting.  Only, no, because grasping it to flip and hold up each page makes my thumb ache.  So it's not a good format for pleasure reading either.

So I put each one on a shelf and when the year is over, they go in a drawer or something, because they are so full of great cartoons or factoids that I will never look at because my thumb aches, but still, they're so great.

I can't tell people I hate these things.  I therefore propose that, to get me out of having to deal with this problem, they be banned.

OK, I suppose that's asking a lot, but could somebody change this  #&^%$-ing  bad design?

Southern Ice

We got a sprinkling of snow on top of about an inch of solid ice, in these coastal parts, and that ice is heavy stuff.

OK, I'll just use the other stairs....

Ice about an inch thick on flat surfaces.

Cardinal picks his way down the road.

Dirt roads fared better than the asphalt, but by 11 AM when I had dressed in enough layers (it was 25 degrees f.) to go out, that highway in the background was pretty clear; only with lots of meltwater puddles, which will slick up again overnight.

Unlike our previous snowstorm, it won't be back up to 40 degrees f. by noon.  It won't get above freezing today, and the whole mess will refreeze tonight.  Tomorrow it will start melting away!

Change the things you can. So we did.

Here's the lowdown on 2013:

We lost both my in-laws in 2012, my father-in-law 2 weeks before Christmas.  Christmas 2012 involved fresh grief, and was harder because of an unpleasant houseguest who simply could not comprehend that we had just had a life-changing loss, dammit. This unbalanced person became a problem through several months.

In January we were hit with a legal and personal attack (unrelated to the houseguest).  The legal is nothing, a nuisance that will go away, but the personal was so unexpected, we felt punched.

While we tried to stay emotionally balanced over this, elder daughter got sicker than she has ever been.  She nearly died twice.  We had endless trips to doctors and hospitals, we were up all night for multiple nights, and it took about 5 months to get her back on her feet.

I went to the ER six times March through November, for 4 family members including myself, in support roles 5 times, only once as the patient (It was time to give in and go back on antidepressants, and the first one gave me a supernova migraine).  We lost Dad, as you know.  The rest of us are fine.

In the middle of all this, the hurricane season loomed.  Yall have heard me stress out about the goddam things to a tedious degree.

My grandparents' 1930's laundry hamper

There was naturally a list of things we cherished.

There was also getting Dad through a storm.  Even an evacuation of a couple of days would be hard, since he needed a place without stairs, and I didn't want to load all of us and 3 fighting cats onto any dear people who would offer to house us.  If a storm damaged Dad's house, he'd need to be comfortable somewhere for...weeks?  Months?

We could do nothing about the other problems of the year except wait them out and steer into the wind.  But we had to do something to solve the one problem we could solve.

We went to our bank.  It was amenable to giving us a mortgage.  We bought a house.  Inland.

The above-mentioned personal attack made us want to keep this location a secret, so we did.  Basically, we've had the house since May.  Things are quiet, I'm tired of sitting on this, so.  There it is.

We've been in a slow moving process since summer, taking stuff we didn't want to lose to disaster, and setting up a room for Dad.  We didn't spent a night there until Christmas - the place was a heap of boxes, and a couple beds and chairs, but we realized that Christmas at Dad's house would be too painful, so we scrambled to take what we'd need to stay in the new house for a few days.  Changing the setup of Dad's room was sad.  Making it Daughter's room for the holiday was happy.

The house is still a heap of boxes.

We are in love with it.  It's quiet, it has a whole room JUST for a library, it has a walled garden for Scooter, a big train room for Larry, I will have a real room for an office.  We are both so ready to leave here.

We're all OK, including our daughter who is back living her life again, blessing of blessings.  Younger daughter was in a total car smashup - her boyfriend had to be cut out of the car - but they had only minor injuries, and that qualifies as miracle.  Blessing again.

So, 2013.  Blessed, horrible, ground us up in a meat grinder, then let us all get put back together, and at least for me, I'm not who I was. I never expected any year to worse than 1994, and you can laugh or generally be disgusted at my childishness over that.

So help me, I thought there was such a thing as "enough" for fate/Higher Power/whatever, to put us through.  Any fool could read the news and know better.  I could, in fact, read the blogs of some of my friends and know better.  We're still luckier than a lot of people.  But I've lost something that I undoubtedly needed to lose.  I don't know what exactly it is.  Stupid trust in a benevolent power?  Trust in a tendency of the universe to balance things?

One of the main reasons that we were anxious to have a place inland left us on the 29th of November when Dad passed.  There were other reasons we needed the house, but I also think about how we never expected to spend Christmas away from the coast, yet, how crucial it was to our sanity to have that house as a sanctuary for a holiday that I dreaded. Is that the Benevolent Power letting the storm play out but giving us a boat?

Maybe I will be an adult someday, and have a faith that's more like, "you can't always get what you want.  But you get what you need."  I'm sure closer than I was.

Not *quite* like popping bubble wrap...

Popping it is more fun, but, I swear, stripping off old tape from used bubble wrap is almost as satisfying.  Makes it more reusable, sure, but pulling off the tape is pleasurable anyway.  That wad of tape in the foreground is tonight's achievement.

Little things make me happy, but I need them to come along fairly frequently.

Scenes from a Christmas 2013

My mood is a little better than it was at my last post  (a post the first paragraph of which I was about to tone down, when I saw that it had gotten views already, so I left it alone, figuring if I felt tired and depleted, and it showed, then heck, the truth was out).

It was a quiet, small Christmas.  Elder daughter had a couple days off, so she was with us, and we were all away from this neighborhood and the aching absences of it.   We took the two indoor cats, since hanging around with no cats is awful. 

  How COULD you do this to us?
 It's an outrage.

They were freaked at first, in a strange place, and then quickly decided it was wonderful.


We missed Scooter, the outdoor cat, a lot, but his favorite cat sitter came over to placate him.

 

K Mart, late afternoon Dec 24th.  "OK, Christmas is over!  Clear that space and have it full of Valentine stuff by one minute after midnight!  Let's go, people!"

 
We all went to a Genuine Episcopal church Christmas Eve, and it was a really joyful service.  I roasted a turkey.  It was small and Rombauer insisted it needed a day of refrigerator thawing, for every 8 pounds of bird, but after 36 hours the 8.75 pound bird was rock hard and took a lengthy series of cold water quick-thaw procedures.  Dinner turned out pretty good.  I really hate dealing with frozen turkey.

I had time to do some thinking and a lot of vegetating.

Here's the tree, with village underneath.  The church, and the two simple houses in the background, are a village that I made in 1992.  Back then, it sat on the windowsill of my single-woman apartment, on a white pillowcase and with low watt bulbs tucked under the buildings, to make them glow out the onionskin windows.  It was cool looking and I was quite proud of it.  I wanted to use them this year, among the rest of the houses and shops we collect:

I made my buildings out of mat board.  I wanted them to last. and the walls themselves are still colorful and haven't warped, but my joining methods were pretty primitive, so they're separating and need work to tighten them back up.  When they were new, lights under them looked awesome, kind of glowing out of the plain home windows, and the stained glass window I colored for the church looked nifty.  But the stained glass is really Flair [tm] pen coloring and has faded some.

So now, internally lit, the church looks like this :

Yet that somehow seems appropriate, after all the church infighting that's gone on.  In fact it's a good illustration for the quote that's probably getting overused lately :  "There is a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in."

A year to shut up about

I'm of two minds about blogging right now, because whether readers want to hear about how I'm handling things with this unexpected loss is less important, actually, than whether I want to blog about it.  This has been a bad year in a lot of ways before this.  Blogging about it without whingeing has seemed impossible and blogging with whingeing has seemed pointless and dreary.  The most important things are better -- everyone is pretty healthy -- and some legal crap is still unresolved,  but this sudden loss of Dad was....

The basics are, though, that it's OK in some ways, and awful in others.

There is nothing I could have wished for, or that I prayed harder for, than that my dad be spared a long disability or loss of his splendid mind.  I threw all those  "Thy will be done" prayer rules to the wind.

I know that the suffering people have to go through has absolutely jackshit to do with whether they deserve it.  And for all the good my father did, all the true caring for the hurting people in this world, all he taught us about giving, and his strong, amazing faith, I said to God,  "Dad deserves to enjoy life right up to the end, he deserves an easy passage, and so, GIVE IT TO HIM, do You hear me?"

God did.  Dad ran his life and made his choices up to the end, which was after only 9 days of illness. I could have wished him a last Christmas, and all of us a last Christmas with him, but the Hands that were in charge did good enough.  I guess.

Dad loved Christmas.  He was prepping, as he did every year.  The Christmas CD's started to play at his house on Nov 1., and he started  his Christmas cards.  This wasn't a premonition that he should get it done early.  His hands were stiffening badly and writing was time consuming, so he did a couple a day. (I've had to mail them with notes about his passing enclosed - these are old and dear friends, and needed personal letters.)

We had the annual Christmas planning conference:  who will cook what, how we will collaborate on the adopt-a-family shopping and wrapping, sharing the funding but Larry and me doing the leg -- and wrapping -- work.

He also ordered presents early, since he wanted nothing to do with computers or credits cards, and instead snail-mailed checks with order blanks.

A week ago, a package notice appeared in his mailbox. The box contained this.

There is no one else in his life he would have bought this for, but me, and yes, I cried all the way home. And will cherish it.  It's more than just a book he thought I'd like.  Cat mysteries abound in that catalog, but he'd never bought me one.

This is a "Black Cat Bookshop Mystery" and it tells me that he (who didn't like cats) knew I was secretly (a secret from him.  I thought.) feeding a black cat that was hanging around his house.

We joked about the cat.

"That damn black cat keeps hanging around."

"Hmm.  Well.  There are stray cats all over the neighborhood, but I guess it has too much competition up the street and decided to move into the woods down here."

"I'll just shoot it."  (Phony scowl.  Clearly trying to get me to react.)

(And I complied): Don't you DARE!"  (Knowing he really wouldn't.)

His driver license expired in August and he didn't try to renew it.  We set up errand mornings for me to take him around.  I found out later that, afterward, he would wait for Larry and me to drive off somewhere, and then take the car out for some illicit driving.

I have to explain why being told this made me so very happy.

He loved going out doing his morning errands, and, though he relinquished the license voluntarily, he hated the dependency.

He couldn't run errands illegally, because hey, when I came over to drive him, he needed to need the groceries, dry cleaning, haircut, etc.  So he must have just driven around because he could, and undoubtedly partly for the same reason he was so dedicated to his errands before -  the awful emptiness of the house without my mom.

But it seems to me that one of the worst things about getting old would be that you can't really have a private life anymore.  Even if someone you love and like to be with drives you, and you make all the decisions as to what and where....still, that person is all There, In Your Business.  You've given up a lot of your private life.

When I found out that he had a secret, and that he demanded, and by damn had, a personal life that didn't involve me, I cannot tell you how happy I was.

But there is a rightness about his passing that none of us felt about my mom's passing.  Hers seemed unnecessary, too soon.   And I have real guilt about ways I treated her, ways I failed to appreciate her, guilt that I don't have over my dad.

He and I were a lot alike, and we both had strong opinions, and we disagreed a WHOLE lot about some serious issues.  But we were fine with each other voicing those opinions, and we knew when and how (with a joke) to close a conversation.   He had the rare gift of disliking some of my beliefs, while making it clear not only that he loved me anyway, but that he found me genuinely admirable.

But I still can't deal with being in my parents'  house.  The people who made it matter are gone, and the thought of Christmas anywhere near this place and these memories is unbearable.

We have a good, soul-soothing place to go.  And when things calm down, I will tell you about that.  But understand, I did not want to do Christmas at all.  I'm enduring it partly as an homage to his love for it, and partly because flying to Las Vegas (Seriously, I want to do that.) would hurt feelings and be impractical.

But when I told my brother about that idea, that I want to because it is the total opposite of anything resembling my real life, he understood.

(Photo from a couple years ago)

%$#ing Ho.  Have a good one, yall.

To ponder

My old friend from college sent me this poem.  I love it.

     The Way It Is

     There’s a thread you follow. It goes among
     things that change. But it doesn’t change.
     People wonder about what you are pursuing.
     You have to explain about the thread.
     But it is hard for others to see.
     While you hold it you can’t get lost.
     Tragedies happen; people get hurt
     or die; and you suffer and get old.
     Nothing you do can stop time’s unfolding.
     You don’t ever let go of the thread.

       -  William Stafford

The homage I didn't get to give

When we met with the minister to discuss Dad's funeral, he said there would be a chance for people to speak. At our mom's, we spoke at the interment, but this time it would be in the church service.

On the day itself, we had the interment and the minister invited anyone who wanted to say anything there to do so, and said there would also be an opportunity during the church service (to which more people would come).  My brother said that if heaven is like the house our parents ran, it'll be a wonderful place. I really loved that.

The church service came. The church service went. At no point did the minister invite anyone, much less me, to speak. I was and am furious.

 Fortunately, the guy, who knew my dad well and had had many talks with him, said a couple of the things I intended to say. This loss was personal to him too.  Maybe his mind just fuzzed out.

But basically, it was important to ME to speak for my dad. For the occasion it needed to be short, so this barely scratches the surface, but anyway ... here it is, appearing in this venue only :

Everyone here knew my dad, and most of you knew the different sides of him.  He had a great sense of humor.  He was deeply dedicated to any cause he took up.  He could be grouchy and diplomacy-challenged.

He despised poverty and abuse, especially when the victim was a child.

He had a scientist’s understanding of the environment, but he had the love for the earth and the wilderness, of a man of faith, who believed in a creator, and in our responsibility as stewards of that creation.

When he believed something was right, he had trouble accepting compromise.

He had both empathy and wisdom.  Once when I was about 12, something deeply upset me.  I wish I could tell you what it was.  I don’t even remember now, but it was some fact of life, or pain, or death,  that I had become aware of.

I told him about it,  and I said,  “I try not think about it, but I can’t stop.” 

And he told me, "Don’t try not to think about it.  Do the opposite.  Think about it,  face it down,  keep on,  until it loses its power over you."

He was a great dad, and a man of integrity and compassion.

I will miss him more than I can say.

My Dad : 1927-2013

We lost my dad last night.

This poor shot is a year old, but it makes me smile because it's Dad using an iPhone.  He wanted nothing to do with modern technology, but needed something with a camera function.

There aren't words for how I'm missing him.


Back later

The Language of Stubbornly Refusing to Let Go

For Christmas 1968, when I was 14, I asked for a bookcase.

I seriously thought it over beforehand.  Never had I asked for anything practical, or non-toy, or non-fashion, or unrelated to any pop boy band .... or anything non-fun.  I wondered if I would regret using up a Christmas wish on an empty piece of furniture.  But I kept wanting it, so I took a deep breath and asked for a bookcase.

This is it.  It still exists.

But as early as the next house, 1972, it moved to the basement where it held jars of home-canned jelly, and where it apparently attained some damage from seepage through the wall.  I'm not sure where it was after that, but it stayed with my parents as a utility shelf as they moved again, and was in the basement next door ten years ago.  But I do NOT think it was in there through Hurricane Hugo.  Hugo would have submerged it up to at least 3 feet in muddy salt water, and the damage looks too superficial for that.  It must have been upstairs.

Beats me.  But I asked for it, back when we moved into this house 10 years ago, and until today, it took the same role, sitting in our basement getting dirty and holding useful whatevers.

I see furniture in this kind of grubby condition in the bulk waste bins at the Recycle Center all the time.  But that always bothers me.  Yeah, it's not so pretty but sheesh, it still works!  It's real, solid, wood, not veneered particle board.  We're talkin' 1968, here.

OK, it needs some repair before it will hold much of a load.  It's disquieting to admit that something I got new is now "old wood" but it has dried and the shelves are pulling in.  The corroded back corner makes it a little unstable.  It will still free-stand but a gentle push tips it.  That's OK, it will go against a wall anyway.

I can't give it up.  Giving things up is something I am not good at.  I keep remembering how I loved it, and I did.  I never for a moment regretted getting a book case for Christmas and adored filling it with cool finds.
 
So I've just given it one heck of a scrubbing, and Larry, who knows how, says we can get those shelves more secure.

I choose to consider myself thrifty and able to appreciate function over cosmetics.  That's much nicer than admitting I absolutely hate to let go of anything.