Inch One: Sam

I have written about my son Sam off and on over the almost 17 years I have been blogging. (Yes, 17 years as of March 17! Frigging unbelievable for lots of reasons, starting with my health.) The younger of my two sons, Sam has provided me with a plethora of challenges and laughter and stress and joyous moments over the years. I know, I know. All children provide parents with those same things; Sam maybe just doubled down on challenges at times. 

And, in all fairness, if you were asking Sam, he no doubt would say the same thing of me as his mother: "Yeah, yeah, Mom has provided me with a plethora of challenges and laughter and stress and joyous moments over the years." And then laugh and go on his merry way.

So why Sam now? Because a week ago he and I had one of the best conversations we have had in years. 

Years.

The phone call was set in motion when I texted him the above photo, asking him if he remembered that mug. Sam bought that for me decades ago, when he was a kindergartner or first grader and attending the Santa Store for students at his elementary school. I still have the mug and have been using it regularly as of late. In my text, I touched base with him; I last talked with him on Christmas and knew he had changed jobs since seeing him last July. I was curious how he was doing and how his partner Georgia was doing. 

Sam replied later that night: "Great mug," adding he would call the next day. And he did.

Sam started immediately on the biggest change in his life: he had just the week before quit his most recent job (as a mail handler with the USPS). Why? Sam didn't mince words: "It was the worst job I have ever held. Just horrid." He was working long, middle-of-the-night hours (biking to work at 3:00 a.m. when he started); his body clock was a mess; he rarely (very rarely) had days off or evenings free; he could not see his friends or spend time with Georgia or go biking or cook for the sheer enjoyment of cookng. He hadn't been able to see his brother in a long time. In short, Sam was disconnected from everything and everyone that gave his life meaning. So, with Georgia's enthusiastic blessings, he quit. (Note: Sam and Georgia live frugal lives, intentionally, so his quitting would not sink their lives. He can take some time, catch his breath, then move on into another job.)

And even though he had just quit, I could hear the change in his voice and his laugh. His body clock had already reset. He was already seeing friends. Life was immediately better.

Sam, Sam, Sam.

From the beginning, my sons (and their families) have been threaded throughout this blog. Even with the 2450 miles between us, I hold them in my hearts and am often reminded of them: a comment, a shrug, a book, a mug. In an early post about Sam's upcoming birthday, I noted how he had once had a perfect day, ending with his scooping up a penny on the ground and exclaiming "Is this my lucky day or what?" 

When we talked last week, I heard that same joyful, lighthearted exhilaration in Sam's voice as that long ago little boy spying a penny. We finished the call and I sat there with tears in my eyes: happy for my boy and his decision to quit an unhealthy situation. 

In that long ago post, I wished Sam a life full of lucky days, and, more importantly, that he never lose the ability to recognize them when they came along. I'd say that wish came true. 

Starting From Scratch

Even the houseplants are out of sync this winter

Well, not quite. How about starting from almost scratch?

For many reasons, some of them significant, I have been pretty quiet on the blogging front. Forget my not posting; hell, I am weeks (still) behind on reading the blogs I regularly follow. The events and issues of the last several months have commandeered my time, my concentration, my own tasks—you fill in the blank. And, to be clear, I am not talking about the national and international scenes (horrific though they are): I am talking about family/personal events and issues.

And I have missed my other life: my personal time, my time with my dear Warren, my ability to focus on a task or a project. I have missed writing. I have missed taking photos. I have missed...me.

But after snuffling around (yeah, I had a major pity party a few days ago; that's a pretty rare thing for me) and staring into space way too much, I remembered that I had a solution in my back pocket to get back into my own blogging. Back in 2014, I wrote about Anne Lamott and a exercise she talked about in her book Bird By Bird. She kept (maybe still does) a one-inch square frame on her writing desk. Why? 

"It reminds me that all I have to do is to write down as much as I can see through a one-inch picture frame. This is all I have to bite off for the time being." 

Using that quote as an inspiration, I wrote a figurative square inch a week for the next 180 weeks. 

180 weeks: that's over three years. Whoa. 

So I am going to try the one square inch method to see if that will help jumpstart my writing again. 

Here's hoping. 

Frugalism? Frugal Minimalism? And What About RWE?

With a title like that, you have got to be wondering where I am coming from. Where I am coming from is almost three weeks of being heavily involved in my father's medical situation, starting with the broke femur on February 8. The great news is that he has been making a stunning comeback for his age and is already walking, slowly but steadily, with a walker, and the PT team hopes to graduate him back to his rollator in the next few weeks. He will be returning to his apartment (one floor below him right now) about mid-March. 

As I earlier today emailed my dear friend David, I am exhausted. With all the positive news on the Dad front, I feel as if I can finally stand down. Seeing him today and his changed attitude really drove that feeling home. I think that is why I am so exhausted: it is all hitting me and sinking in. 

So now let's turn to the here and the now.

I recently read this book after seeing Gabe Bult (who I watch on YouTube) rave about it. I get a kick out of Gabe; he reminds me of my son Sam at times. Gabe was so enthusiastic about this book that I got it from the library (of course I checked it from the library: FREE BOOKS):

I noted (in a text to the same David mentioned above) that Sasaki is post-Marie Kondo and her "spark joy" approach (which I still don't buy into) and I found him easier to read. (Although, in tip #26 of "55 tips to help you say goodbye to your things," he does praise Kondo for her "killer phrase" and writes that feeling "the spark of joy will help you focus.")

But I don't live in a minimalist household. I am not a minimalist. I am married to a man who will never be a minimalist. But all the same, I found the book giving me some mental space. I found myself thinking of ways that I could make small changes.

Hence the opening photo. That is the guest bed in my study. Usually it is covered in papers, files full of papers, and miscellaneous stuff. Yeah, just stuff. When we had a guest earlier this month, I made a huge stack of the "stuff" and moved it temporarily to another room, then moved it back to the bed as soon as our guest left the next day. After reading Sasaki, I spent 30 minutes and went through all the mess, filing some, recycling some, shredding some, and just clearing the bed. 

Wow.

Whatever the state of minimalism in this household may be, I laugh to think that we get bonus points for being frugal. For example, this bottle of soy sauce came into my life in late 2010, when Sam moved out to Portland:

I just finished it 10 days ago. (And in part it lasted that long because Warren does not like or use soy sauce.) Per Sam, when I posted this photo on Instagram and called his attention to it: "End of an era." 

Sure was. 

And on other frugal fronts, we had an entirely free main course last week because, on a stop at Andrews House, our community center and the home of our legal clinics, there were two massive zucchini and boxes of small onions (Andrews House, among other things, runs a mobile market for people who have food needs). Yes, I took them; they had been sitting there all week. The zucchini were so large that there was enough for two batches of banana zucchini bread AND our supper of zucchini and onions, sauteéd and served over pasta.  

Free supper! Now that's frugal. Oh, wait, we had it the next day too! TWO suppers for free! 

For evening entertainment, I continue to work on the jigsaw puzzle in the evenings. Free entertainment, of course. (Just like reading or writing letters.) It is slowly coming together:

Finally, what about RWE? What the heck?

RWE is Ralph Waldo Emerson, the sage of Concord and the man who inspired Henry Thoreau to turn off the conventional path and seek his own direction. I have never read any Emerson, other than very short excerpts here and there. (In comparison, I have read a lot, although not all, of Thoreau's writings.) I have never read Emerson's most famous essay, "Self Reliance." But the opening of "Nature," also considered his other greatest work (and the one that grabbed Thoreau who heard Emerson read it while Thoreau was an undergraduate at Harvard) drew me in:

TO go into solitude, a man needs to retire as much from his chamber as from society. I am not solitary whilst I read and write, though nobody is with me. But if a man would be alone, let him look at the stars. 

Let him look at the stars. Be still, my heart.

So what about RWE? I hesitate to say I will go on an Emerson deep dive. But I may (may, mind you) dabble a bit more in his work. After all, life is a journey, not a destination. (And yes, RWE wrote that too.)

Reading Over the Decades

February has been a hard month so far both on the weather front and on the family front. As I wrote in late January, we were hit with snow and way cold temperatures. And while I rejoiced over being able to walk again in early February, between the remaining icy mounds and then the family matter, I did not walk from February 5 until the 12th, causing me to write where I keep track of my time/distance: FINALLY—A WALK! (Frankly, I'm surprised I only gave that note one exclamation point.)

The family matter was that on the 8th, while making his bed in his apartment, my dad caught his foot in the blankets he'd placed on the floor and went down, breaking his left femur in the fall. If you have to break a leg, Dad did it in the best possible way: one clean, sharp break in his upper femur and not his hip. Surgery was the next day, and a few days later he was released to the Rehab Center at the complex he lives at: all good. Assuming all goes well, he has several weeks of rehab ahead of him before he regains independent mobility (he uses a rollator) and moves back into his apartment. But, as the adult child in the area, I spent most of last week at the hospital by myself or with my sister-in-law Kate, and have been at Rehab every day since then while Dad gets acclimated and settled in. Let's just say a lot (A. Lot.) of my last 8 days has been away from home. I am grateful I still have a father (he will be 93 this August) and do not resent the time one bit. I am also exhausted. 

So while I have been so occupied, other things have gone by the wayside. I was starting to do more photography, and that got sidelined. My reading has been hit and miss, to say the least, both reading blogs (Laurie! Kim! Sam!) of friends and books. And my writing, which I really, really want to delve back into, took a huge hit.

I'm tired right now. And there are chores to do. But by golly, this post has been circling in my head for DAYS and I am going to get it done and posted! 

In recent months, I reread the two books shown above: My name Is Asher Lev by Chaim Potok, and All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque. And out of the gate, I will say both of those books read way different at age 70 (well, almost 70!) than they did when I first read them in my teens. 

Like many younger people, I first read All Quiet when I was high school. A. W. Wheen was the original translator and the version I just read was his translation. (Maybe it is THE English translation.) I think I read it again in my 20s, but then did not pick it up until this winter when it popped up in a Little Free Library.

The cover says "THE GREATEST WAR NOVEL OF ALL TIME." Perhaps the version I read decades ago did too, but I don't remember reading it and thinking that. Good? Sure. The greatest? I don't know if I thought that then or not. 

But I sure do now. At my age, with way more life in the rearview mirror, I am stunned at how Remarque paints the absolute meaninglessness and hopelessness of war. And maybe because I was just finishing the Auden book, in which the author paints a vivid picture of how, for the English, World War I was the war that forever defined England, I was more acutely aware of what that war meant to those who fought in it and those who would have fought had it not ended. As I shared with a friend after reading the Auden, I now realize why World War I was the defining war for my beloved Grandmother Skatzes, despite her sons and grandsons fighting in World War II, Korea, and Vietnam.

And the last lines are heartbreaking and beautiful: 

He fell in October 1918, on a day that was quiet and still on the whole front that the army report confined itself to the single sentence: All quiet on the Wester Front. 

He had fallen forward and lay on the earth as though sleeping. Turning him over one saw that he could not have suffered long; his face had an expression of calm, as though almost glad the end had come. 

And then there's Asher Lev. As I have mentioned before (and more than one time), Asher Lev was put into my hands by one of my English teachers in high school, wanting to make sure I did not stop writing the poetry I wanted to write rather than write "nice" poems. Unbeknownst to her, she kicked open the door to Judaism to me, a comment I made at her memorial service this fall, causing her very devout Christian younger daughter (who I'd been in school with in our teen years) to whirl around in the front pew to stare at me. 

Chaim Potok helped shape my beliefs and spiritual leanings, and truly his memory is blessed. Asher Lev is where it all started. Rereading it now in these times, especially with the sharp rise of antisemitism in this country, impacted me even more. 

I last read Asher Lev in 2018, apparently. Not as long a gap as All Quiet, but long enough. But still, it reads way different at my age than it did before (and that 2018 read may have been a quick read). This time, the conflict that Asher works through as he pursues his artistic calling, in direct conflict with his Chasidic community, his father, and his ancestors, made me all but tremble. It made me think of the different choices and turns my life has held, including those that were in direct conflict with family and others, made me feel the emptiness when I don't write or shoot, and made me grateful that Barb Humphreys took me aside all those decades ago and put Asher Lev in my hands.

I don't know what the next several weeks hold on the Dad front. Continued improvement, I hope. I know there will be time commitments and that just is what it is. Warren is very supportive and that helps me beyond words. 

But I also want the coming days and weeks to hold reading. And photography. And writing.

May it be so. 

Breaking Free

Yep, there's still snow

I walk. A lot. A whole lot. I walk for lots of reasons, not the least of which is for the clarity and peace of mind it brings me.

Because of the snow and bitter temperatures I wrote about in my last post, I have been housebound for days. Oh, I get out and away in the car to run errands or visit my father, things like that. But at a personal level, I am housebound, not daring to risk my wrist (or worse) in a fall on ice. As a result, I last walked on January 24.

Until today.

Today I broke out. Warren teaches on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons, and I hazarded a guess that Ohio Wesleyan would have clear walks on its campus. So when he left for class, I rode along with him, hoping to walk.

My guess was correct; my hopes were realized. The campus walkways were clear.

I walked all around campus. I walked to a nearby CVS to pick up some items for my dad. From there, I walked back downtown (crossing campus again) to the library. I was impeded by my choosing to err on the side of caution and wear my winter boots, but I walked all the same. I took a break at our library, then walked back to OWU to meet Warren. All in all, I walked for 70-some minutes, pure heaven.

I learned a few important things from my walking today. (1) The core downtown is pretty good—not perfect, but darn close—when it comes to cleared sidewalks, which means I could wear my Hokas next time, which would make my feet a lot happier. (2) It is all but impossible to cross Sandusky at Harrison  to get to CVS on foot (My, what Big Snow Piles we have!) and I will not gamble on doing that again until the snow melts, which is probably weeks from now. 

Don't get me wrong. There is plenty to keep me happily occupied at home, besides being here with my favorite person in the world, who is also usually here. While at the library, I grabbed a jigsaw puzzle from the Take One/Leave One shelves. I have books, I have baking, I have Justice Bus this week, I have letters to write. Life is good. 

But dang, it was wonderful to break free today! 

Life In the Icebox

A lot of this country is experiencing record-breaking snowfalls and cold temperatures. I cannot begin to match my friend Tani in Minneapolis, but central Ohio has not been a cakewalk. Let's just say that I have been pretty housebound—albeit not entirely housebound—since last Saturday. 

The snow came in mostly on Sunday, with our area getting 11+ inches. A lot of other places got a lot more snow, but they can keep that record. The bigger issue here is the extreme cold. Way cold. Again, other places are colder, but it is no small deal when the morning temperature is -7, as it was yesterday.

And that was not the coldest place we were yesterday. Warren does business with a small metal plating shop in Piqua, Ohio, and had bars to pick up. We drove over yesterday morning, leaving here around 6:30 a.m. and arriving there just before 8:00. The roads were in pretty decent shape (we took US 36 over); drivers were nonetheless driving carefully. ODOT trucks were dropping salt on the highway the farther west we went. 

Our car tracks the outside temperature and is usually within one or two degrees of any electronic board showing the temperature. So we watched it as we drove: -7, -3, -11. -8. The temps went up and down often in response to whether we were near water, for example, or passing by a large field. When we got to our destination, the temperature read -16.

-16.

And that was without any wind chill. 

In short, pretty darn cold. 

We had deliberately planned to stop for breakfast at a small diner, The Farmer's Daughter, that we have passed each time we make the trip to Piqua. The diner is on the main street of Urbana, Ohio, a small community we keep telling ourselves we need to come back and explore one of these days. (Not right now, trust me.) After getting the bars loaded, we headed east and to breakfast.

We had suspected the diner was either a community hub or had excellent food or both. It was both. Breakfast was excellent and plentiful. I enjoyed watching diners coming in and greeting one another and exchanging talk about the temperatures, what was closed, how they were staying warm. As all schools in most of the state are closed because of the extreme temperatures, parents and children or parents and teens also came in, adding to the talk. It was the kind of place where regulars were comfortable stepping into the coffee/drink area to chat with a staffer. 

And it was the kind of place where the owners recognized they had an older clientele and had handicap grab bars in both of the bathroom stalls in the women's bathroom. Be still my heart! 

When the waitress brought us our bill and asked us how the food was, we praised everything. She talked about how much of their baked goods they do right next door in a bakery the diner owns. I commented on the sourdough toast I had ordered with my plate, adding I had chosen it because I bake too. She lit up. "We're looking for a part-time baker," she said, laughing because she knew how far we had come that morning. "Might be a bit of a drive..."

 Yep, might be. But as I told Warren as we drove home, if we did live in Urbana, I'd be tempted to apply for that job. Not because I need to earn income, not because I am bored with my life, but because being part of that community would be fun. 

While I finish typing this, the sun is shining brightly. Our backyard, which I can view out my second floor study window, is a long wash of shining snow and tree shadows. It is 18 out, a veritable heat wave. But worry not, that's only for now. Predicted low tonight? -6.

Life in the icebox continues.

Words

Plangently.

Sedulous.

Encomia.

Numinous.

I read a lot. A. Lot. I have always read a lot, starting in first grade when the scales fell from my eyes and I had that Helen Keller moment of connecting the print on the page to the word in my head. (In The Miracle Worker, the magic word for Helen was "water." For me, it was "ask.") Once that happened, I went right on reading. And reading. And reading. Even now, most years I read over 200 books annually. 

One of those books this year is The Island: War and Belonging in Auden's England, which traces poet W. H. Auden's life from childhood until he leaves England in 1937 at age 30. I began it last night. Given my proclivity to read A. LOT, I was a bit taken aback that I was only on page 75 (and that does not count the 35 pages of Prologue by author Nicholas Jenkins) and already had the four words above scribbled down to look up. That was last night; this morning I pulled out my Webster's Dictionary and set it on the coffee table as I suspect I will be needing it more.

I am only familiar with the older, post-England, urbane, slick Auden. This book has already opened a whole new way for me to view him and his writing. (Heck, just reading the chronology from birth until he leaves England in 1937 opened new vistas.) 

And apparently reading this book is going to make new additions to my mental dictionary.

Plangently.

Sedulous.

Encomia.

Numinous.