Past and Present

 

I was at a City Council meeting—our City Council—last night for the first time in years.

Years.

I went with Warren because Council was talking about a long-delayed reboot of its flag and banner policy. The Symphony has banners for Concert Week that have not been flown in months as the City has been slowly reviewing its policies in light of the Supreme Court ruling in Shurtleff v. Boston. (Note: Not much progress was made last night either.)

I had a small sense of Old Home Week when I walked into Council chambers. I used to serve on our Civil Service Commission, so there was a joke with our Police Chief (who'd been a captain back in those days) and I was able to congratulate our interim Fire Chief, someone I had gotten to know well from those years. (The firefighters union, to my delight, was ever-present at our meetings; our interim Chief was in that bunch back then.) The head of HR, also someone I had known forever, came in behind me, tapping me on the shoulder and leaning in to tell me she was glad to see me. And I sat right next to the young person who I will be voting for in the next Ward elections.

I do not know most of our Council members at all anymore, although I still know the City Manager and, of course, the City Planning Director. ("Of course" because I also sat on our Historic Preservation Commission for several years. Plus I was a zoning lawyer , so even thought the current planner and I did not overlap extensively in that era, I still worked with him and his department before I hung it up.)

I found myself thinking back, way way back, to myself as a college student, to the year I was in between schools, and all the hours I spent at council and school board meetings during that time.

When I withdrew from Chicago at the end of my freshman year, I retreated to Delaware,  moving in with my Aunt Ginger and my Grandma Skatzes. It was a long period of putting myself back together — in every way imaginable. I did not work those months. I volunteered at my high school, teaching classes with the greatest English teacher I ever had. And I started attending council and school board meetings.

I had met a newly elected council member on Election Night that fall, and he encouraged me to see what city government was all about. As I was thinking of staying in Delaware, I started thinking maybe I should get a better idea of how the school board operated as well.

It ended up being a fascinating time – I made friends I still have, I felt at home at council meetings (never school board, interestingly enough), and I began to learn how this city functioned. I knew the insider jokes and side comments at Council. I change my career goal to law school, realizing that, if I was going to stay in Delaware, as I was strongly thinking I would, I wanted to make a difference and have a say in how the community operated. I started to have plans to run for Council at the next election cycle.

That was in late 1975, early 1976. By that summer, I was back in Chicago, eventually on my way to living out west for several years. I did not return to Delaware permanently until the fall of 1990.

I did become a lawyer. And when I moved back, I ended up practicing in the office of that Council member. I had met so many years earlier.

I never ran for City Council. That was not a goal by 1990 and thereafter. I almost ran for school board, but had a conflict, so did not. My service on the two city commissions was enough.

I did not sit there last night full of  nostalgia or wondering "What if...?" Maybe I had a sense of relief that I had not ventured into politics. But maybe not even that. Maybe just a sense of being there, listening to Warren make his public comments, and then heading home.

And that was more than enough. 

By Special Request: Another Pantoum

My blogger friend Kim commented on yesterday's post and suggested I needed to write an ode to twist ties. I do not often write a poem on request, but this one, dear Kim, is for you.

Stopping For Bread Ties On A Winter Evening (With apologies to Robert Frost)

Whose bread twist ties these are I think I know - 

Oh, who am I kidding?

I stuffed them in there long ago

Clearly anticipating a twist tie shortage.

Oh, who am I kidding?

Our household is two, not 22.

Clearly anticipating a twist tie shortage,

I saved every single one.

Our household is two, not 22.

A loaf of bread lasts for weeks.

I saved every single one –

Well, not the paper-wrapped ones.

A loaf of bread lasts for week.

But still I continued to amass those ties - 

Well, not the paper-wrapped ones.

They never last.

But still I continued to amass those ties.

They were becoming unruly.

They never last.

They were not true to me.

They were becoming unruly.

I had to clear them out.

They were not true to me.

I closed my eyes and let them go.

I had to clear them out –

I will be telling this ages and ages hence

I closed my eyes and let them go.

Forty ties stuffed in a drawer.

I will be telling this ages and ages hence -

Whose bread twist ties these are I think I know - 

Forty ties stuffed in a drawer.

I stuffed them in there long ago.

Tiptoeing Back Into Poetry: Pantoums

A pantoum is a highly structured poem. They are a Malay form of poetry and historically have been rhymed. As I noted many times before, I don't work well with rhymes. Luckily, a pantoum may also be unrhymed and mine tend to be. I last posted (and wrote) pantoums back in 2011. 

It is always written in quatrains (stanzas of four lines each). The second and fourth lines of each quatrain become the first and third line of the next quatrain until the final quatrain, which is so neatly linked back to the first and third lines of the first quatrain that you feel as if you have just tied up a package.

I receive the daily "Poem-a-Day" email from the Academy of American Poets. One recently featured a pantoum. Oh my gosh. Back in 2011, when I was writing more extensively, I wrote several pantoums. I had forgotten all about that form and their precise structure.

Maybe, I thought, that was a good place to start writing poetry again.

It's been a while. A long while. 

Pre-Covid, I belonged to a poetry group, started by myself and someone else who was a close friend. Over the months and years, we added to the group. He invited someone; I invited someone. Then a newer member would say, "Hey, we should invite so-and-so to this group."

And so we did.

At its height, we probably had 10 to 12 regular members, with out-of-town guests sometimes joining us. We would gather monthly, often but not always at my house. Someone would usually bring wine, some of us would bring snacks, and we would share our own poems or read a poem that we had come across and felt like reading. (Billy Collins was often read at our gatherings.)

No surprise, the pandemic slam the door shut. There were no gatherings, no anything, while we all hunkered down and regrouped in our personal and professional lives.

Then one member suggested, maybe just to me, but maybe in a group email, what if we Zoomed? So we tried that.

It kinda sorta worked. But there were barriers, including most (all?) of us spending so much time in Zoom because of our jobs that one more Zoom meeting was just one too many. More than once, when I sent out the Zoom link, I will get a quick email: "Sorry, but I won't make it. I am on overload."

I should've pulled the plug earlier. (I am saying "I" because I was the one who set up the meetings.) But it turns out in the end that I didn't have to. On what became the very last meeting ever, sometime in early 2021, the club died a very swift death after two members behaved badly (one by email, one at the meeting) on the day of the last meeting. 

And that was that. 

For the most part, I stopped writing poetry at that point. I had not been writing regularly and that last meeting killed my interest. Oh, there were some scraps and half-bitten lines here and there, but not even much of that. I did not work at it or set aside time for it.

Two things happened.

Earlier this month, I opened my poetry file folder – not the one on the computer, but the massive paper one I keep in my desk drawer. [Know that I have hoarding tendencies. My poetry file made the bread twist ties stash and the plastic straws stash look like nothing. Don't ask. I cleared those out weeks ago.] I took out a handful of poems and read them in the silence of my study with an audience of one – me.

OK there was a lot of ehhhhhh there. But a few caught my attention.

Maybe? Maybe there is something here? 

The second, of course,  is the spark that pantoum email sent through me. 

Maybe I could try to edge my way back into writing poetry more regularly through pantoums? Maybe I just try it.

As I just noted in my last post, I have been writing a minimum of 15 minutes per day. Every day. Almost all of that writing is what may yet turn into a memoir. No, I am not ready to reveal anything about that but what about poetry too? What if I wrote for 15 minutes on the one project and then also allowed myself time to write poetry whenever it nudged me?

What if indeed? 

Here is a very recent and rough example from our trip to and from Mayo. I experimented with the traditional pantoum form in the very last quatrain, changing the wording of the very last line to create a different outcome. 

While driving, I saw

Two sunbows

On the wisps of a cloud.

The sun in a haze.

Two sunbows - 

The sheerest of colors.

The sun in a haze - 

My eyes glanced at the shimmer.

The sheerest of colors:

No wonder they fade in a blink.

My eyes glanced at the shimmer,

But I had to watch the road.

No wonder they fade in a blink.

How could they not?

But I had to watch the road

Instead of the sunbows.

How could they not?

While driving, I saw -

Instead of the sunbows -

Only the wisps of a cloud.

I am feeling my way back into writing. Let's see what comes of this. 

Recombobulating

Yes, this is a real sign at the Milwaukee Airport.

Thea Milwaukee Airport has a large terminal sign pointing passengers to the "Recombobulation Area."

I totally get that.

I am recombobulating. And my recent trip to the Emerald City (Mayo Clinic in Rochester, MN) added to that feeling.

As I discuss my post-2022 life changes with friends, I continue to realize that I am still working to find the rhythms of the day and the week. I find myself struggling with writing. 

Seriously. 

I do not struggle with writing at least 15 minutes a day. That has become a valued routine. With the exception of this past Wednesday, which was a hard travel day back home (I can't write in a moving car), I have written for at least 15 minutes every day since January 2.

So where do I struggle? In recognizing writing as a valid use of my time. I am still struggling with honoring myself and my need and desire to write.

This is my own internal challenge. Warren is tremendously supportive and encouraging. My friends are supportive. My son Ben is pleased. And while I have not shared my writing regimen with Ramona, I know exactly what she would say if I did. "So what took you so long to finally write, Grandma?" And then roll her eyes for good measure.

One writer I follow, Kaki Okumura, recently wrote about how Japanese culture focuses on imperfection, citing kintsugi, the art of repairing broken ceramic pieces with gold, which both beautifies and emphasizes the cracks. Look at our lives through the lens of continuous progress, she wrote: anything we accomplish is progress.

Maybe I need to look at my writing as repairing the cracks with gold, and give myself the grace to do so.

While Warren and I drove the miles from home to Mayo (about 660 miles), we used some of that time to talk about personal matters that don't always get discussed in the rush of any given week. One topic, no surprise, was time. Even without a progressive, incurable cancer, I would be shortsighted to pretend that at almost 67, I have decades of life left. With an incurable, progressive cancer, and having far outstripped even the most generous post-diagnosis life expectancy, any time I have is pure gravy. (Thank you, Raymond Carver.)

I started this particular post in Rochester, on Monday evening after we arrived. In longhand, in my writing notebook. By midday Wednesday, we started our drive back home with some very positive results on the one hand (the myeloma continuing to be incredibly stable; my oncologist called it "surprisingly stable"), and a new (additional) diagnosis on the other (in the "we need to keep an eye on this" stage).

OTOH, OTOH indeed!

So now as I sit at home finishing this post tonight, I circle back to the writing struggle as I consider this new factor. After spending yesterday recuperating (this was a rocket trip of less than 72 hours from walking out the front door to walking back in, at 12:30 a.m. to boot), I got nine hours of sleep last night and could view my life with far more balance. (Truth be told, I felt a lot like George Bailey after realizing he had a wonderful life after all.) 

When my older brother died in 2015, I was one of his eulogists. I speculated in my talk about what lasting advice he would want us to take from his life. After making a couple of proposals, I said, "Life goes on."

And it does.

Raymond Carver was right: this is pure gravy.

Slow Eating

Slow eating. 

I am not referring to the Slow Food movement, which was started in the 1980s to counteract the loss of local food cultures and traditions, including preserving, restoring, and promoting heritage stock from apples to turkeys. 

No, this is a movement of one, founded (out of necessity) in our home. I'm the one.

A week ago, meaning to have a healthy snack after a superb walk, I eschewed the easy carbs of cookies and crackers, and made myself a small bowl of popcorn. About seven bites in, I heard a crack. 

I had bit a kernel.

I spit out what I had in my mouth. No tooth bits, no anything. I touched my finger in my mouth. Okay, no blood either. So must have just been a very loud kernel, right?

Two more small portions of popcorn and I realized something just didn't feel right. I went to the bathroom and opened my mouth wide. Everything looked okay. But when I put my index finger on the tooth in the area that felt different, I was able to move the tooth. 

That's never a good sign.

I saw my dentist the next day. He made the very same comment: never a good sign to be able to wiggle a tooth, April. One x-ray later and we had the verdict: I had broken a tooth. Given that I had no pain, no bleeding, and no sensitivity to hot or cold, my dentist concluded that the tooth was dead and this had just been waiting to happen.

Because of the years of treatment and variety of drugs I have had for my myeloma, I have to go to an oral surgeon for any extraction. Fortunately, we have a superb one in town who has worked on my mouth off and on since 2005. While I was still in the dentist chair, my dentist had called and made an appointment for the extraction. It was a week later. In the meantime, he said, watch how you eat.

"Watch how you eat" translates into slowing way down and eating slowly. Really, really slowly.

As I just shared in a letter to my friend Katrina (spoiler alert, Katrina!), eating slowly has been a revelation. First, because I am chewing my food so slowly, I am paying more attention to what it tastes like and what its texture is. Second, because I am eating slowly, I am aware of the feeling of fullness when it arrives. All those nutritionists and dietitians are right: your brain gets the message of fullness from the stomach after you have eaten more than enough, so many people tend to overeat (a little, a lot) because of the delay in the messaging. Having to eat more slowly made me aware that I felt fuller on smaller portions.

Who knew?

The third revelation is a combination of an old memory and embarrassment that it took a broken tooth to drive the point home. I eat fast. Period. I "knew" that, but I had tucked that knowledge away. The old memory is a long-ago lunch with my then boss and mentor at my law school job back in Portland. Don treated me to lunch at a nearby cafe. We talked, our food came, and we started eating. Don looked at me after a few minutes and said, more or less, "Slow down, April! You're not a starving college student anymore!" I turned bright red and we both laughed.

That's the memory, one that makes me smile because I thought the world of Don. (Still do.) The embarrassment is that it is has been 40+ years since we had that conversation, and here I am (or was up until last week) still eating quickly.

The tooth came out this morning in one gentle twist as it was undeniably and reliably dead (and had a very shallow root to boot). I am on soft foods only today and limited in what I may eat for the next few days. 

After that, my goal is to not return to my hectic eating pace in the days and months to come. There is always enough food; I just need to slow down and savor it.

The Slow Eating Movement. You read it here first, my friends.

Fitzgerald Was Not Wrong

F. Scott Fitzgerald in his later years

 Poor F. Scott. Decades later, he is still misquoted. 

We all think he wrote, "There are no second acts in American lives." But he didn't write that. What he actually wrote was, "I once thought that there were no second acts in American lives, but there was certainly to be a second act to New York's boom days" in a 1933 story called "My Lost City." 

And apparently some version of that line about no second acts showed up in his working notes for The Last Tycoon, the novel he was working on at the time of his death at age 44. Some Fitzgerald scholars see The Last Tycoon as Fitzgerald's own second act to regain his stature as a major American novelist.

I know the feeling of the next act. I'm easily now on my 8th or 9th act, maybe more, depending on where I count from and what I count as an act. And 2023 has, for a variety of reasons, made me wonder what my next act is. 

Last week, at an appointment with my PCP, I said to her, "Don't get this wrong, but I never intended to live this long. I mean, I am truly grateful, but I didn't plan on this!" 

We both started laughing at the same time. What a great problem to have!

But that realization—that I never planned on this given the myeloma—has been on my mind all these first 18 days of 2023.

So what does 2023 look like? 

I have stepped away from most (almost all) of the Legal Clinic, a volunteer effort I have spent much of the last decade and a half deeply involved with. I stepped off the steering committee, I stepped away from the day-to-day operations as of the end of the year. Because of some unexpected December problems. I spent several hours in the last days of 2022 working with my friend Mel (who is Executive Director at Andrews House, which has hosted the Legal Clinic for its 19+ years of existence) cleaning up the mess. I left that meeting with a short list of items to take care of by the next day. Later that next day, Warren and I were driving somewhere and I told him I had finished the list and everything was wrapped up with Clinic. He asked me if I felt okay about that. 

Okay? I felt more than okay, I told him. I felt good and I felt done. I knew it was the right decision to step away finally.

One thing that not planning to live this long has done is make me take a long look at my finances. I'm okay financially. I have a small monthly pension from OPERS (Ohio Public Employee Retirement System) from my years at Juvenile Court and, laughingly, my years on the Civil Service Commission (for which I took the modest honorarium as annual pay, causing my years of service to count as OPERS credit, to my advantage when I got hired at Juvie). By my personal standards, I have a good amount in a savings account, mostly funded by my retirement payout and a bequest from a longtime client and friend who died in 2021. I have not started to draw my social security (I am full retirement age) and this is where the "not planning to live this long" financial planning we did several years back comes into play. Warren will switch to my spousal benefit after my death because it is larger than his. If I continue to live on and delay taking it until 70, he will get the largest benefit due me, which would be about $400 more a month than if I start drawing it in this year at any time. When we discussed this several years about with a financial advisor, I had no doubt I would not be here this long.

 Well, here I am. Now what?  

Not the most immediate problem, but definitely a note in the back of my mind. 

 I do not make resolutions when January 1 rolls around. But I do think about goals, as do some of my friends. What do we want to try to do in this coming year? The same words keep coming up: pay more attention to our health, exercise more regularly, gardening (well, of course!), more reading (the same), working on personal projects (sewing, painting, writing). 

On that last one, looking at the changes in my days without the Legal Clinic, I took a deep breath and told myself to start writing. Not "Oh, I'll think about that and get to it later" and certainly not "I'll wait until inspiration hits." Finally, finally, after years of shutting my eyes to it, I am writing every day. Every. Day. I set my alarm for 15 minutes and write. (As I type this at my study desk, I can look sideways and see the words of Richard Wagamese, an Ojibway writer, taped to my wall. "Just write. Every day. Fifteen minutes." Wagamese was right.) Most days, I continue writing after the alarm goes off, but I make sure I get those 15 minutes in.

I have now outlived F. Scott Fitzgerald by almost 23 years. I'm quite sure he did not expect to die at age 44. And I never expected to see 60, let alone be pushing 67. 

Let's see what this next act brings. 

Fourth Quarter Pennies Review: Wrapping Up 2022

 

Well, 2022 is at an end, I have tallied the numbers, and we are both looking ahead to what 2023 holds on the grocery front. Let's just say there were some surprises.

In the 4th quarter of 2022, we spent $704.29 on groceries. $644.70 of that was on food, $59.59 was on household items (toilet paper, dish detergent, parchment paper). Average per month in the 4th quarter? $234.76.

Average monthly spending on groceries for 2022? $240.62.

Food prices continue to fluctuate and baffle. After oatmeal jumped to $3.49 at Aldi earlier this year, it was down a dollar when we did a stock-up shopping in December. A dollar. That was not due to shrink-flation either; those were the prices on a 42 ounce container of old-fashioned rolled oats. Mayonnaise is up another dollar since midyear; it is up over a dollar and a half since early 2022. Flour, which rose 50¢ midyear for a five pound bag of unbleached Kroger brand, came down 20¢ by year's end. Milk has leveled out from midyear highs. On the other hand, eggs continue to be staggeringly expensive.

The egg prices reminded me of a long-ago colleague who took the California bar exam unsuccessfully four times in the early 1980s and finally shelved her dream of practicing law. A single mom, she told me that when she was trying to pass the bar and would have to cut back on her work to study for it, her kids had to live on ramen and eggs because money was so tight, and it just wasn't fair to her kids to do that for her to pursue the lawyer dream. Fast forward 40 years and I'm thinking she wouldn't begin to be able to feed her kids the eggs she relied on for protein during those lean times.

There was a 4th quarter goof that, in the name of transparency, I have to share. In too much of a rush during one morning shopping trip, I reached for and bought not the Kroger ground turkey one pound in the tube (with the special coupon driving its price way down) but the Simple Truth (Kroger's "pure" brand) ground turkey ($5.99) and (again, reaching far too fast and not paying attention) the organic Simple Truth ground turkey (($7.99). I did not realize my error until we were driving home. (Warren to me: Should I turn around so you can go in and fix it? Me: No, I'm embarrassed and it's my own fault.) That was a $9.00 error. (So what did I do the special ground turkey? Divided it into half-pound portions, which I then froze, and have been doling out very slowly since then, that's what.)

Moral of that story? Match the sale coupon item with the RIGHT product!

We (well, especially me) had a much bigger grocery buying discovery (well, shock) that happened just this weekend on the very last day of 2022. The shock came at home, not at the store, and it is all entirely our (again, primarily my) doing. We had gotten several free bread items that would need stored in the freezer so as to not go bad before we could eat it all. I asked Warren to help me with the basement freezer (an upright, 10 cf freezer); I would reorganize the kitchen freezer (the refrigerator freezer) before we tackled the one in the basement. 

The basement freezer was in pretty good shape in terms of organization. We had rearranged it a few months earlier, so much of what we did was just move some items around to free up some space.

The kitchen freezer? Oh. My. God. As I excavated it, I learned just how much GOOD FOOD I had squirreled away in there. Yes, I knew I had hot dogs in there. And some other items like popcorn and buckwheat flour. But bean soup? Diced pork frozen in meal-sized portions? Grated orange peel that I could have used in making biscotti this past holiday season? 

What. The. Heck?

I follow Hope and Larry Ware of Under the Median on YouTube. Inventorying your pantry, cupboards, refrigerator, and freezer regularly is a directive Hope often gives. I always credited myself with doing a mental inventory, although I knew I should be better as our pantry sometimes reveals surprises after we have bought a replacement at the store, but I didn't think I was too bad. Having now gone through my kitchen freezer, I now have Reasons #2931208 as to why Hope says to inventory what you have. 

Facepalm.

After all these, ahem, discoveries, I said to Warren, "Except for perishables, we should be able to go ALL of January with no groceries." That was yesterday. This morning, after thinking about it some more, I said, "Heck, we may make it through February without buying anything except perishables!"

On the bright side, as food waste rightfully gains more attention, we continue to keep ours to a minimum. Except for a very recent loss of about six celery sticks that had gone too long in the fridge to salvage (they hit the compost), and two opened, three-quarters empty jars of salsa that managed to mold, our food waste due to spoilage is about zero. And our food waste due to boredom ("Oh, let's not eat that again...") IS zero. In this country, residential (home) food waste is about 39%, or 21 million tons, of the total food waste a year. In addition to the savings of not wasting food, it really does make a difference. 

Goals looking into 2023?

One is the short-term challenge of getting through January without any grocery purchases except perishables. Looking into the refrigerator right now, that would be milk (me) and maybe orange juice (Warren).

The year's challenge is to bring our monthly spending down to $200.00 a month despite the higher food costs. There will be a garden, of course. And knowing now what I do about my squirreling-away tendency, and knowing that we are well-stocked on all fronts, I think that is doable.

Here's to 2023.