The Limits of Being a Parent

  There comes a time in the life of every parent-child relationship, where you let go.   I have been accused of hovering, worrying and directing the life of my son way past any appropriate age.  Well, last night I think we finally passed a mutual test.  He called out for help, I wasn't there and he found another solution.   We are both proud and sad for each other.  So much so that he didn't even eat the pancake I made for him today, and I felt okay about eating it instead.  No hard feelings.

I realize the words above could have been written about any age after a child starts to eat real food.  The process of becoming an adult has so many transitions.  But the younger milestones are the stuff of children's books and parenting books galore.  Once you get over the first day you drop your kid at daycare, the first day of school, the first bike ride, the first time behind the wheel, you would think there would be easy sailing ahead.  The rest will just be a wonderful adult relationship with your begotten one, talking over interesting readings, joining me for concerts, hikes and vacations.  Well, of course not.  It is a constant pushing away, that takes decades.  Although he still  wants to be fed, we don't share any other common interests.  Even though somehow he has absorbed my political perspectives, he is loathe to admit any similarities.  Ah well, at least a paucity of employment has kept him around the home.

Yesterday evening Robert and I went to a community supper, put on by a local church. Although we had no connection to the religious aspect, I am happy to participate in any neighborhood gathering. I tried to convince my son to come along, but he refused and instead went off to water the vegetable garden at his father's house, several miles away.  Dad was gone traveling for a week and in the meantime his house was being reconstructed by a team of workmen.

After setting up the sprinklers, my son went into the house to see what might be offered by the contents of the refrigerator.  The house had new interior walls and would soon have new doors.  For now, they were all stacked up, leaning against the refrigerator, which was in the middle of the soon to be kitchen.  Somehow, the act of opening the refrigerator undid the delicate balance between the weight of the doors and opposing weight of the fridge.  As soon as Evan opened the door, the refrigerator started to fall, along with the wood doors leaning against it.  Although he was able to close the door, he was not able to right the fridge and doors.  If he managed to extract himself everything would crash to the ground, which would at least damage the new fridge and possibly trap some body part as he tried to get away.

So holding the fridge and doors against his back, Evan took out his phone and called his mother.  No answer.  This was not surprising since I rarely carry my cell phone on my body, and certainly didn't think to have it as I strolled two blocks to the church supper.  Then he tried Robert's phone.  Robert has a "smart phone' which is always with him, but he had turned the volume off in deference to the social occasion.  He did not notice the call.  So then Evan started calling his friends.  He found one close enough to come over and help.  But by the time we got back to the house and called Evan, his friend still had not arrived.  Evan had been applying his weight against the refrigerator for about 45 minutes.

So we called the friend and helped him find the house, but I could do nothing more than wait to find out whether my 21 year son would be crushed by a refrigerator or saved by his friend.   After about ten more minutes, we did find out that of course, he was saved.  My son who hates to ask for help, managed to reach out to his peers and and get what he needed, just in time.  I learned that I truly can't be there for him  every time he might need me, but I did promise myself I would learn to carry my cell phone.

 

Retirement

My friends are retiring, as in, failing to go to work each day.  Some enter a frenetic world of unpaid labor, for which they get only thanks, what they were looking for in the first place.  Others wake later and later, and dissipate the hours in some combination of household tasks and electric aided entertainment that quickly causes the sun to set. (If you ever doubt how much electricity determines your activity, throw the breaker and see how quickly you become bored.)  I watch the transition with some envy and more despair.

I have always wanted to do more than I can possibly manage.  In theory, it is only the eight hours of paid labor I do each day that gets in the way of the incredible productivity I have in my mind.  But each weekend I disprove this fantasy, as I loaf and lounge and entertain my way through my free hours. I know that if my job disappeared, I would be no more likely to get to my long list of potential accomplishments as I am in the hours between work.  I think that we have a set point for purposeful activity, just like we do for calorie intake.

Recently my eighty year old mother visited me for two weeks and put real fear into me.  Although she has been busy and involved with many activities in her life, she is markedly slower in her physical self, and has become ridden with worry and a sense of fruitlessness that spoils any effort to engage in meaningful acts.  I realize that old age is a battle between your body and your mind.  Whichever is weaker pulls the other down and the spiral can be inexorable. 

I am sure I don't want to end up like that.  I don't want to have decades with no purpose.  Even though my job has its repetitive grind, it is still the most interesting part of most days.  I think most people retire because are sick unto death with the job they have, not because life without a job seems so compelling.   But I don't know.  Retirement is something you can't know until you get there.  I'm not there by a long shot.

Plums

I have just been preserving some plums from my two plum trees.  Luckily the trees are small and ridden with leaf eating insects, or else I would have a true crop surplus on my hands.  I hate to see even one piece of fruit go to waste.

Last year I made a batch of jam, and some sorbet with these plums, which are too juicy for drying.  But Robert has already filled the cupboard with strawberry and raspberry jam, added to the jars left from last year, so I don't think that is a good use of this luscious fruit. Without energy for fancy recipes, I just squeezed about thirty plums and added some sugar and brought them to a boil.  When cool, I will simple freeze the juice and hope I remember it is there for smoothies and to mix with club soda throughout the year.  I also experimented with pouring some vinegar on some whole plums stuffed in a jar, to see if plum vinegar could be produced. If so, I will add it to my strawberry and raspberry vinegars.  I am delighted to have these fruity vinegars for salad dressing, but my housemates are unimpressed with red vinegar, no matter what the flavor. 

I am feeling frugal, due to the fear of our impending default on the national debt.   Somehow I think the stupidity of this government is going to end up affecting my own bottom line, and I will be glad to have a cupboard full of jam and vinegar.   It is true that Legal Aid, who I work for, is primarily funded with federal dollars, so if the whole county goes topsy turvey, I will perhaps be out of a job. 

I can't eat plums without thinking of the poem by William Carlos Williams and wanting to create some homage of my own:

It is cruel to strangle each little plum by its pit,
Squeezing guts into a pan, tossing away the skin,
and then turning up the heat until there is roiling fuschia
but I could not leave such sweetness on the ground
for the raccoon to gather in his clawed fingers.
and suck into his pointed mouth.

Can't Sleep

I have been neglecting my writing, which means that I have been missing myself.  Tonight I went to bed, trying to feel tired, but couldn't get there.  Mostly, this is caused by the discomfort of having my mother visit for two weeks.  We are more than halfway through and I can see the light, but it is still tough.  Many women see their mother every day and they are used to all the slings and arrows of childhood being flung back and forth all life long.  I went three thousand miles away, as soon as I had the choice and it was perhaps the only clear decision of my life.  There was just no doubt that I wanted to be far away from my birthplace. 

I can't even say that there is anything wrong with my mother.  It's just that I hate to see all the ways I am just like her.  I just can't stand the similarities.  And I can't act like my normal adult being when she is in the house.  I run to work to relax into who I have become.   That is all worthy of endless therapy, but it is easier to keep a big country between us.

For right now, I am keeping a little list of the things I will do when I get normal life back.  Sorry, Mom.

Big Birthday

I just reached the speed limit of birthdays.  It has been feeling too fast for awhile, and now it is official.  My life has been full of half-hearted attempts at achievement, followed by long periods of potential.  I seem to remember a physics lesson about potential and kinetic energy that might apply.  I believe that everything important to know I learned before I was fourteen, including stuff that involved pulleys and springs. 

This might be the first birthday ever when I didn't even get a cake.  Somehow the tradition of chocolate cake has been replaced by expensive restaurant meals.  I must visit a bakery tomorrow and correct the omission.

It is cliche to comment on the aging process.  For one thing you immediately lose your audience.  Those older than you make fun of your anguish.  Those younger still can't imagine what you are talking about.  Also, we all worry about such different things.  I repeatedly come back to a board game I played as a kid, called "Careers" where you had to pick a mix of fame, fortune and happiness, and find the career that was most likely to give you that mix.  I remember I always did an even division, unable to guess which aspect of life might be the most important.  I note that there was no option to choose lawyer in that game, perhaps indicating a basic flaw in my path.

Anyway, as I face the second half of life (!), I promise myself there will be more creativity, more friends, and  more adventures.  There will be more action, less potential energy stored in springs.  There will be more beauty, less cynicism.  Already, it has begun.

Lost in the Funhouse

I have been lost in Blipland for more than a month.  This magical place is found at blipfoto.com, where I masquerade as Lido Beach.  http://www.blipfoto.com/grazingllama   Although writing words is part of the experience, mostly it is a daily scavenger hunt for a photo worthy of framing for all to see.  Because of this activity, my image-ining being must apologize to my literary being.  But here I am, at my wordy desk. 

Geography and its delights depends on expectations about the weather.  The Northwest has not been behaving as it should and thus, a trip to the emptiness of southeast Oregon did not yield the hot dry weather I craved.  It was cool, rainy and the high places were filled with snow.  But where most of the landscape is open for the taking, and you can camp and hike wherever you want, I relaxed into the car camping routine, which goes like this:  Take everything out of the car, make some imitation of a home without all those hard edged walls, cook, clean, sit around, go to sleep, and then put it all back into the car and go some other place and take it all out again.  

During our journeys we saw evidence of those who tried to keep the outside out and then what happens when they gave up.  How quickly nature took back the property, the rats and owls and swallows moving into places where people once had raised a family.  It was fun and sad to take pictures of the disintegration.

Looking at the remnants of lives lived makes me yearn to create something of value to mark my place on earth.  I know the Ozymandias foolishness of  this desire, but it fuels my creative endeavors.   In the end, I just want to be able to see a path behind me of where I have been, to remember all the days, even as they slip away.

Stuff

I woke up in a sweat, which is the usual consequence of the hot flashes that hit me at night, like lightning rolling across the hills.  However, this arousal seemed more the fault of a dream, where I gave some menacing street people some money, only to discover later that they found my home and further ripped me off.  I know this scene came from yesterday when I saw an apparently prosperous man stop and give another man who was sitting on the sidewalk, some money and engage in a conversation.   I wondered why I, passing the same sidewalk sitter, had not done the same.  Overhearing the two talking, as I unlocked my bicycle, I heard a scrap of information about the charity recipient, that he was trying to get a visa so he could work, and my sympathy moved towards him.  So he was not a street person by avocation, only in governmental limbo, trying the best he could.  This was immediately replaced by the thought that he was probably lying.

What is it that makes us simultaneously want to connect with others and stand in suspicious judgment over them?  My guess is that we are all in a state of insecurity, perhaps a remnant of our animal days where we could be attacked at any moment by a saber tooth tiger.  This feeling is often triggered by situations where money is exchanged for something we want.  Earlier this same day I bought two expensive objects.  First, a fancy raincoat, to replace one that had gone missing after twenty years of service.  The second was a framed photograph  I saw as we toured neighborhood homes in an "Art Walk."  The coat I undoubtedly will use over and over in this rainy climate, but I realized  my decision to purchase this item was determined entirely by the endorsement given by the helpful salesman, who said  he owned this very model and loved it.  Getting it home, I still am pleased with it, but I feel I might have been told what I want to hear, a time honored technique of retail sales.  What I don't understand is why it works so well.  Am I so desperate to ally with a complete stranger that I would put down hard earned money to show approval and agreement?

The second purchase was certainly of no use at all, yet I felt drawn by its beauty and felt desire to have it for my own.  Is this the same covetous nature that caused us to extirpate the Indians from the US, and now the seal lions who dare to take salmon we might otherwise catch and eat?  Of course I paid money for this item, yet somehow, as soon as I got it home, I was disappointed with it, proof of the folly of all shopping.  The potential to buy a piece of happiness is never fulfilled.  The real question is why, in the face of multiple lessons do we never learn?

I think it is because money is a magic system we have created to trick us into feeling good.  When we have extra cash, we look around for how to trade it for stuff to induce a positive emotion.  This transaction always ends up inferior to the truer ways of feeling good; the ones that involve personal effort or mastery or risk.  For the last ten days or so I have been smitten by a new website where you post one photograph taken each day, with room to name and explain your choice.  It has been a fun challenge to go out and take photos every day and pick one that you want to share with the unknown masses.  I discovered I do not have the chops to produce good photos on demand.  My success with photography comes with beautiful places I happen into, not because I have an eye for the shot.  And certainly I do not have the patience to tune a photograph into its best version.  Perhaps I was just acknowledging my limits in buying a picture from a person who makes a living with a camera.

It is interesting that the word "stuff" means both an essential essence and unclassifiable debris of possession.  Contrast "We are such stuff as dreams are made on," from Shakespeare, and the recent newspaper headline: "Piles of stuff complicated Southeast Portland housefire."  I guess we keep hoping to buy the former, but end up with the latter.