Category: Life Lessons

Turning Tides

In The Atlantic, I recently read an article with the tragic title: Why The Past Ten Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid, and the even sadder sub-title: It’s not just a phase,” by writer Jonathan Haidt.

I read Haidt’s article with a curious mix of horror and hope. Let me explain.

We all know – or should – that we are living in unprecedented times. I hadn’t been sure when the “tipping point” occurred but by author Haidt’s calculation, it was around 2010.

It was during and after that year that social media evolved from being benign social sharing platforms into something immensely more insidious and hateful.

Added capacities on social media platforms such as “share” buttons and “retweeting” meant that any random ideas or comments – no matter how wrong, inflammatory or hysterical – could spread like wildfire.

Viral posts could elevate someone’s profile for a short time or destroy someone in the same timeframe, depending. This capacity for viral gang banging has been deadly on our society, our mental health and our level of trust in established institutions set up to guide and oversee our collective stability and well-being.

Once upon a time, the leaden processes of discourse and change drove me nuts. To achieve or change anything, there were protocols that deemed, and often doomed, positive change, especially if a quick response was required.

As most of my early work life was in academia and government, I would shudder when an issue needed to be submitted to and resolved “by committee.” Committees met infrequently. They were often populated by self-interested windbags more interested in the sound of their own voice than in speedy and positive resolution of anything.

My mind often moved more quickly tin those days to a “logical conclusion.” I saw committees as largely self-serving, pedantic entities that doomed many great ideas to the dustbin. Death by attrition.

At this time in history, decision-making power over important issues was concentrated in the hands of the elite few. That was the case in universities, government, sometimes churches, and definitely in financial institutions.

Enter the internet and social media. Global game changers. But not in a good way as it has turned out. There is a strict separation between the left and right. There is an erosion of trust at all levels and in all institutions. The problem will not go away or get better, Haidt points out, as AI informs and adds to the mountains of disinformation so readily available and consumed.

I now find my support for the internet’s possibilities much more conservative. I was excited to my very core when the internet emerged. I lauded its democratic promise. Now, I reasoned, anyone, anywhere, with a computer and wifi had access to all of the knowledge in the world. Wow.

Its ramifications for artists and innovative thinking were limitless, I reasoned. Authors rejected by traditional publishers for their whole careers could now find a corner of the internet where their writing could be read. Their manuscript could be published. It might be dreck but it was their very own dreck.

Free speech would arise in unison from all corners and classes, I reasoned. Free speech combined with easy access to information and facts would create a more democratic and just society. How naive was I?

Jonathan Haidt writes: “The story of Babel is the best metaphor I have found for what happened to America in the 2010s, and for the fractured country we now inhabit. Something went terribly wrong, very suddenly. We are disoriented, unable to speak the same language or recognize the same truth. We are cut off from one another and from the past.“

Haidt continues: “… Babel is not a story about tribalism; it’s a story about the fragmentation of everything. It’s about the shattering of all that had seemed solid, the scattering of people who had been a community.“

It is the conclusion of Haidt’s article that heartens me. He identifies pockets of sanity and resistance that are emerging. Hallelujah. Haidt alludes to something that has been on my mind for some time. It is “We the People” who must work ourselves out of this mess.

We collectively recognize the downward and unpleasant shift in angry and violent discourse because we are living it. Here is where we must recommit ourselves – as in so many instances – to self-salvation, if there is salvation to be had from technology’s less positive influences.

“In recent years, Americans have started hundreds of groups and organizations dedicated to building trust and friendship across the political divide, including BridgeUSA, Braver Angels (on whose board I serve), and many others listed at BridgeAlliance.us. We cannot expect Congress and the tech companies to save us. We must change ourselves and our communities.“

Excuse me while I head over these websites to see how I can do my part in bringing this runaway train back into line. You may hear more about this issue from me. It feels critical to sustaining our democratic institutions and processes.

Even more important to my personal hobby horse about elevation of the health and well-being of individuals, it feels critical to recapturing our collective sanity and peace of mind.

Just This Today

Because this one fact is just that important to contemplate and remind ourselves … again and again and again ad infinitum. Because truth is true and worthy of reminding ourselves. Frequently.

“Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time.

Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, the only fact we have.

It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death–ought to decide, indeed, to earn one’s death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life.

One is responsible for life: It is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness from which we come and to which we shall return.” —James Baldwin (THE FIRE NEXT TIME; Vintage Books & Anchor Books)

Come Fly With Me

Today’s writing prompt: What is something you would attempt, if you were guaranteed not to fail?

What wouldn’t I attempt? Without question, the biggest challenge I would tackle would be to become a pilot. The urge to travel and fly was in me from an early age.

At 17, I applied to be an airline stewardess with a small regional airline in the Eastern part of Canada. The rejection letter was partly disappointing and partly heartening. I was too young to be hired they told me. But they encouraged me to apply again when I turned 19.

As fate would have it, by the time I was 19, I had been accepted at university. That sealed my fate for the following four years and many years that followed. Still, I worked in a good deal of flying in those university years.

I travelled twice to Europe twice between academic semesters. At the end of third year, I spent a summer in Egypt on a student seminar with about 50 other Canadians.

Following graduation, I travelled to Asia and throughout Sri Lanka, India and Nepal. You may have read of my trek through the Himalayas .

My husband was a commercial airline pilot. The irony and suitability of our union has not been lost on me. While I was schlepping from country to country on this airline or another as a passenger, he was actually flying the planes. Our paths never crossed in those days but we laugh at the possibility that they certainly might have.

My husband was a pioneer in the age of commercial flight. He flew for Pan American World Airways for 20 years until its’ untimely demise in 1991. The death of that iconic airline marked a sea change in the history of aviation.

Pan Am set the bar for class, luxury and service. I marveled that prime rib roast was not only served at seat side in Pan Am’s first class section, but had been roasted in the airline galley. Passengers got to choose their preferred cut. The wine selection rivaled a 5-star Michelin restaurant. Caviar was a standard “appetizer.”

My husband tells stories of the many glamorous passengers he ferried back and forth across the oceans. Elizabeth Taylor. Maggie Smith (who hated to fly). Flip Wilson (funny as hell.) Duke Ellington (wore a dewrag.) Burt Lancaster (shorter than he looked onscreen).

In one poignant story about a stewardess he tells how excited she was to serve Rock Hudson in first class. But her heart quietly broke after sharing her excitement with her galley colleagues. It was only then she learned Hudson’s male travel companion was also his boyfriend.

I had heard of Pan Am off in the distance. Ephemerally. I never flew on it. As a Canadian, we had other choices for European and international travel. It is my loss. The Pan Am logo on the side of a 747 was an iconic symbol in countless movies and TV shows. My husband refers to the cockpit of a 747 as his “office.”

Pan Am stories still drift through the world and are recounted by many people we meet – whether travelers or employees, always recounted with a certain wistfulness and joy. Pan Am employees seemed to universally love working at Pan Am.

My husband’s stories are full of glamor and fun they had both on the aircraft and during layovers. Pan Am employees believed – it is said – that “the world is my oyster.” When Pan Am declared bankruptcy in 1991, and went out of business, some employees committed suicide.

There are still Pan Am clubs in many places where there are still enough ex-employees to justify them. There is a Pan Am museum in Florida. You can still buy Pan Am “merch” and memorabilia online.

Today there are many female commercial airline pilots. Had I been born later, I might have been one of them. My husband and I often talk about the unlikelihood of our meeting in the first place. It was on an online dating site, not a normal domain for either of us. I was in Canada. He was in the US.

Along with the mysteries of falling in love, we talked with familiarity about restaurants and sites we saw in Buenos Aires, New Delhi, Rome, Paris, Munich and many other international capitals. In one conversation, he finally gave up asking me which countries I had visited: “This might go faster if you just tell me which countries you haven’t visited.” It still makes us chuckle.

No chance of failure? I’d be in a flight simulator somewhere in a New York minute. I’d abandon a lot of other dreams to pursue the goal of becoming a pilot.

And who knows? I ain’t dead yet. The game isn’t over until the fat lady sings. Of course, that phrase means one should not presume to know the outcome of an event which is still in progress.

Which is – in this case – my life.

So we’ll see.

Happy Anniversary

Today’s writing prompt: What was the hardest personal goal you’ve set for yourself?

This is timely. Today is the 24th anniversary of my sobriety. Back in the last century, I made a commitment several weeks before the turn of the century. I was going to take my last drink before the clock struck midnight on December 31st, 1999.

So I did it. In retrospect, it feels easier to have quit booze than it likely was. In the culture I came from, drinking was social currency. “Have a beer!” “Join us for cocktails after work.” “Pick up a 2-4 and we’ll go camping for the weekend.”

That booze masks pain is a given. But there was something more to it and the culture in which it thrived. A mark of adulthood? A sense of belonging? An adult-like behavior denied to us when we were 18 years and 364 days old. But the next day!! Wow. Hoist a glass. Join the fellas. Be a man!

Of course, this mysterious crossover to “adulthood” age barrier is quite state or province or country specific. Also gender specific. Women are not granted the same sense of admission when they take their first drink – another peculiar sex based inequality in our culture.

When I was a teenager, I was a passenger in a car that slid off the road and flipped over. We all walked away. When the tremulous driver shakily meets up with his father (the cars’ owner), his father offers him a “real” alcoholic drink (instead say, of a glass of milk or a soda).

It would appear an element of the rite of passage into the drinking culture also has to do with not killing a carful of your peers. Chin, chin!

Some famous incidents stand out in my drinking career. I was 20 and had just travelled nonstop overnight by train from Munich, Germany to Barcelona, Spain. I was exhausted. But not too exhausted to go wide eyed when I learned styrofoam coffee cups full of Grand Marnier cost 20 cents each.

I think I downed a dollar’s worth. Not to good effect. I fell asleep on my side under the hot Spanish sun. I awoke several hours later with a deep, painful sunburn on the right side of my leg. It took many more cumulative years of similarly stupid acts before it finally dawned on me that I had a problem.

One thing about alcoholism is that it can take time to develop and for the problem to become obvious. When you are young – as with most everything else – your capacity for recovery is more resilient. Long term alcohol consumption seems to break down cellular resistance to its more deleterious effects.

It did with me. I can’t say precisely when I realized “I had a problem.” I can’t say precisely when “I knew” I had to quit booze for my own sake and the sake of my children. Booze took nearly everything from me until it finally exited my life. Booze did not go quietly into “that good night.”

But went from life booze finally did. October 11, 1999. There is much to say about what the intervening years without booze taught me and put me through. How I learned to manage pain and tragedy and disappointment without it. I’m not 100% sure how I adapted and survived life without it. I just know I did.

Am I stronger? Probably. Healthier? Absolutely.

Sometimes I get my jollies sniffing the bouquet of a dinner companion’s delicious liqueur. If there is one thing I miss about booze, it was the sensual delight. The exquisite tastes. The heady bouquets. The complexity of the flavors.

Then my mind casts itself back to waking up deep fried in the Spanish sunshine after my Grand Marnier binge all those years ago. And all of the temptation and inherent pleasures that imbibing even a sip of the liqueur in front of me dissipate.

I get myself a soft drink and more and more frequently, a glass of ice water. With lemon. Liquid nirvana.

Considerably less flavorful but infinitely more satisfying. It’s a more than acceptable tradeoff. It still is today, 24 years after taking the pledge.

Rent A Relative

This is my brand new, billion dollar business idea. “Rent A Relative, Inc.” Who’s with me?

I mean, there are already “rent a girlfriend” agencies. They offer an attractive and agreeable companion who can accompany you to any one of a number of events to show that you are socially viable.

I wonder how often those transactional “dates” turn into “actual” relationships. I mean it is a lot more honest and upfront than a lot of our culture’s haphazard dating rituals.

If you already have the quid pro quo worked out, then arguably it would be much easier to set up the working parameters of an actual relationship.

Actual “homegrown” relationships are messy and often unpredictable. Interpersonal relationships are dependent on a myriad of factors that act on our loved ones over which we have no control. Teachers. Bosses. Traffic and road rage driven drivers. Difficult colleagues. Difficult clerks and pushy salesclerk. Banks. And increasingly, airlines.

If a sexual dalliance is your desire, there are countless other agencies that offer those services. Once and done. Or two or three times if you are testosterone heavy. That’s the man side. I admittedly don’t know much about the woman side of the equation. My “experience” is restricted to Richard Gere’s bold performance in the movie, American Gigolo, back in the day.

Men selling love and sex is not as popular a notion in our culture as the idea of women dispersing themselves sexually for fun and profit. But that is kind of a running theme in our society. Women usually bear the brunt of responsibility for sexual “deviation” regardless of the circumstances or perpetrators.

The exchange of sexual favors for money is a whole other well-established business idea than I have. And it has been around a lot longer than my business idea.

What I hate about real relations is history. It is hard if not impossible to escape. So just as you are trekking along on some happy afternoon outing, you find out that that thing you just said reminded them of something you did or didn’t do when they were 11 years old.

Apparently you never acknowledged that slight. Or you didn’t take it seriously enough. Or you never made up for it. Sufficiently. Or you don’t understand what it did to them.

In the face of such “feedback,” I am often rendered moot. Not only do I not necessarily remember the offending incident, but have to take my “relatives” word for it that I did what I did and I didn’t do what I was supposed to do to atone for the injury.

A rented relative could be counted on to never bring up past unpleasantness. They would have no knowledge of what you did or didn’t do in the past. You may miss the fact that they don’t remember the good things you shared in the past.

But this arrangement does hold the inherent guarantee that all present “relations” (to coin a phrase) would be smooth and easy.

When you are “done” with the hired relation, you could just stamp their time card and send them home. No commitment to the weeklong stay . No awkward silences after Uncle Freddy got too drunk (again). And “mistakenly” bumped into niece Sally’s chest.

No senseless revisitation (as happens way too often) in arguments when the sins of a lifetime are drug up and hurled at married partners with vicious precision. None of this resolves anything. It creates new wounds. It perpetuates the old wounds. Nothing is resolved.

The relationship doesn’t grow or move forward. The dynamic simply gets stuck in the sand. Tension is the predominant tone as the injuries lurk under the surface ready to rise up instantly in the face of renewed triggers that revive them.

So it makes perfect sense to me that hiring a relative for important family celebrations and visits makes infinitely more sense. No senseless anxiety about whether we are measuring up to Aunt Mary’s unflinching hosting standards. No wonder about what Christmas gifts to send to your grandparents when they are already millionaires and own everything imaginable.

That estranged son that causes so much unrelenting pain? Switch him out. Invite a “rent a relation” to make the rounds of Christmas parties with you. Or a husband even. The possibilities are endless.

Now I’m the first to admit the idea is pretty fresh and unformed at the moment. It will need work to bring to fruition.

But scoff if you will, in this age of AI and robots and technological advances, I honestly don’t think we are too far off. I want to get in on the ground floor.

There are relations I love dearly and wish to keep in my life forever. Still there are no guarantees. But since I have fairly light relationships with several existing family members, if pressed, I would love to have an agency to call up and have them send over a sister or two for Christmas dinner to jazz up the celebration.

I think it is a brilliant idea. And what worries me, is that in this day and age of disconnected and fragmented human relations, there is a ripe and ready business opportunity right in front of our noses.

So again I say, scoff if you will and I ask, who’s with me?

Write This Way

Writer Anne Lamott is my kind of people. Given her legion of fans, I guess a lot of other people feel the same way. 

She’s wry and witty and insightful and very funny and irreverent but also with a keen felt sense of the sacred and miracles. That seems to be a pretty cool way to go through life.

I found this Anne Lamott excerpt [naturally] at a time when I need it most. We word worshippers are becoming an endangered species. The other night my adult daughter said to me, in passing: “Words don’t mean anything any more.”

It felt like a gut punch. It felt similar to the growing disrespect and lack of civility I feel in business and social discourse these days. [My galling experience flying home to my husband from Canada was a particularly loathsome example of incivility gone wild.]

So when I get the chance to lift up and, indeed, proselytize the words of someone whose worldview I share, I am so on it.

That said, savor this perspective and these book recommendations from Anne Lamott. I actively seek wisdom and insight these days like I used to seek public recognition and booze [cross addictions].

She’s one of the good guys.

Anne Lamott’s 5 Favorite Books for Finding Hope

“I try to write the books I would love to come upon, that are honest, concerned with real lives, human hearts, spiritual transformation, families, secrets, wonder, craziness—and that can make me laugh. When I am reading a book like this, I feel rich and profoundly relieved to be in the presence of someone who will share the truth with me, and throw the lights on a little, and I try to write these kinds of books. Books, for me, are medicine.”—Anne Lamott

“Strangers in Their Own Land” by Arlie Russell Hochschild

“I have been foisting this on everyone since the election. A famed sociologist from Berkeley spends months visiting the Louisiana Bayou and getting to know the people who live there—their values, problems, minds, hearts, lives, and dreams. What they tell us in their conversations and how Hochschild changes by listening to them give me hope for our country.”

“Happy All the Time” by Laurie Colwin

“This is a beautiful, hilarious, big-hearted novel about four really good, slightly odd mixed-up people (like us) as they form couples: shy, worried, and brave. I have given away THOUSANDS of copies.”

“Praying for Sheetrock” by Melissa Fay Greene

“This is one of my favorite nonfiction books ever. It’s about a small backwoods county in Georgia in the 1970s struggling to be included in the progress for civil rights and about the idealists who lead the cause against entrenched racism. It’s a story that reads like a novel, filled with eccentrics and ordinary folks. Lovely in every way. If you read it, you will owe me forever.”

“The Illustrated Rumi” by Jelaluddin Rumi

“I love Rumi so much. I can open this book to any page, read any one of his poems, study any one of the illustrations, and feel spiritually rejuvenated—or at least a little less cranky and self-obsessed.”

“Women Food and God” by Geneen Roth

“This is the most profound and helpful book on healing from the tiny, tiny, tiny issues around eating and body issues that some of us have had for, oh, most of our lives. Charming, wise, funny, and deep.”

Via Radical Reads

What Owns You?

Today’s writing prompt: What would you do if you lost all your possessions?

I have gone through that experience a few times in my life, literally and figuratively. Sometimes by choice. Other times by loss. theft, or my own omissions. I forgot stuff in various places occasionally. So annoying.

In the absence of solid social and family support, possessions became my anchor.

It wasn’t a rational substitute. But the mental and emotional preoccupation of “taking care of” stuff gave me the illusion of self-care and control over my personal domain.

Going through a lifetime of possessions over this past month drove home the lesson of how deep an illusion it was.

Life would be much tidier if we just came preprogrammed with all the requisite skills we need to succeed in life. But we don’t. Growing and growing up involves time and the mysterious alchemy of nurture and nature.

We can take inventory of all the qualities we inherit from our parents and extended family and environment. In to that mix comes the special sauce of our own character and personality that we bring to the table.

Our personal taste seems internally determined but is undoubtedly overlaid with the influences of our childhood home or homes. It is why we often see gaucherie or insecurity in the decorating tastes of the nouveau riche.

It is said that the middle class have things, and the rich have money. If you were raised in poverty or the middle class and come into money, that background is often manifested in excess. If you haven’t learned healthy boundaries or money management rules growing up, you may go off the rails quickly if sudden wealth comes your way.

On one of those fascinating, if squirm inducing, “I Won The Lottery!” shows, a middle-aged redneck took inordinate pride in the original Italian marble statues (imported directly from Italy!) that surrounded his oversize backyard pool.

He made a point of explaining why he didn’t give his teenage daughter an allowance. “She has to learn she will have to earn her own money,” he said, disingenuously. “Just like I did.”

Hanging out with people who have or come from money, you see how taken for granted or comfortable they are with wealth and comfort. Want something? Get it. Lose or break something? Replace it. Don’t have any at the moment? But I will.

There was no gnashing of teeth or wailing about how to get what they wanted or getting their needs met. When I was about 14, I tentatively asked my Dad for $5. “I already gave you $5 last week. What do you need more money for? “Tampons,” I almost whispered, writhing in shame and humiliation.

Our emotional relationship with things develop much like as our relationships with human beings develop. When attentive human beings are not consistently available to meet our multiple needs as we grow up, we compensate. We may then learn to divert our attention and seek satisfaction from things instead of getting our legitimate human needs met.

It’s a pervasive compensatory tactic.

“Too many people spend money they haven’t earned, to buy things they don’t want, to impress people that they don’t like.”
― Will Rogers

Today’s writing prompt asked, what would you do if you lost all your possessions? I might throw a party. I might pack a napsack and head for parts unknown. I might go to a meditation retreat center to think about what my life was before and after possessions held me in thrall.

If/when that day comes. I hope I will treat myself with the requisite level of empathy and compassion for doing what I did and felt I had to do to make up for emotional deficits in my life.

Until I finally learned to meet my normal human needs and find satisfaction in healthier, people focussed ways.

Real World Test

Airline travel. Used to be a fan. Now not so much.

I am writing from the belly of the beast. Newark airport.

As I posted, I was looking forward to flying back to my new home base in Florida.

For one reason or another, I ended up going today instead of yesterday. No biggie.

I needed the extra rest.

Got my bags and cat all on board safely to fly southward and arrived. In Newark.

Getting out of Newark appears to be more of a problem.

On the spot, a flight attendant proclaimed the “airline approved” hard-sided carrier “unsuitable.”

Me and carrier and cat within it were all escorted off our flight.

Now what?

Go to Newark Airport baggage and buy a soft-sided carrier, I’m told. Where is that? How do I get there? How long does it take to get there and back?

In the old days, airport personnel just “knew.” They were familiar enough with their environment and what was needed and where to find it. These days, if it can’t be looked up on the internet, it can’t be found. Not easily at any rate. And absolutely not quickly.

Another flight leaves in 40 minutes. Will I get on it? Highly unlikely.

There is a shocking degree of “not my problem” among airline and airport personnel these days. We seem to have lost any sense of shock or outrage about treating people without even the basics of care, courtesy and dignity.

The gate agents who were there to “help” me disappeared. Literally left their posts and went elsewhere.

I suppose my biggest concern is that this type of shoddy service is so common these days, it’s hardly worth mentioning. Because it seems to happen to everyone at one time or the other all of the time.

The foundations of civil society will not end with a bang but with a whimper. It is the daily erosion of common courtesy and decency that are eroding our social structure.

Much more even than the flashy, big-mouthed politicians who push “solutions” to our social ills that not even they can take seriously in their private domain.

So I sit and wait as I have been instructed to do. My options are limited. They run the airlines after all.

I am in a state of mild shock and disbelief. Not so much because I have been personally mistreated and disregarded by hired professionals who are mandated to have your best interests at heart. But because everyone is being treated like this lately.

If you subscribe to the notions of “the golden rule” and “what goes around, comes around” as foundational tenets of the social contract, it is not surprising why our society’s well-being seems fundamentally frayed and flawed.

Am I attributing too much meaning to a service slip from a major airline? Sadly, I think not.

Leaving on a Jet Plane

I’d like to say all my bags are packed and I’m ready to go. I’m not. That is what I will do today.

I used to love travel. I remember the excitement in getting ready for a big trip. And there were some very big trips in my life.

From my home base in Canada, I flew to Sri Lanka for a three month walking trek and sojourn through India and Nepal. On another occasion, I flew to Seoul Korea to connect with my family on tiny and dazzling beautiful black sand Jeju Island off South Korea’s coast.

Then there was the southern sojourn to Argentina to take a ten day horse trek across the Andes. And I once flew due North and landed in Iqaluit, Nunavut for several frost filled days to attend the Arctic Winter Games.

Many writers laud the benefits of travel. I do. It changes you. It broadens your perspective on so many things. It can shatter the illusion of cultural superiority that some secretly harbor if they have not travelled very far from their home base.

One look at a carved monument in almost any country should knock that out of your system pretty quickly. Not always, of course. But often.

Travel is a kind of education that you cannot replicate by reading books. Books stimulate the imagination. Travel stimulates the senses. Nothing could replace the overwhelming sights and sounds of a spice market in New Delhi, India.

Celebrating Holi, the festival of colors, is one of the most unique occasions I’ve ever taken part in. In under an hour, me and my traveling companions were physically drenched in a dozen colors from handfuls of special chalk thrown at us. Deliberately!

As you wander the streets of New Delhi (or anywhere in India on that unique, special holiday), everyone is equally streaked with multiple colors of dust.

Indians generally have a great sense of occasion. Nothing can match the style and splendor of an Indian wedding drenched in rich fabrics, brilliant colors and enticing smells.

When most of my college buddies were working at traditional summer jobs after the term was over, I spent every summer traveling on some pretense or another. Europe. First as a waitress in a massive tourist hotel and the following summer as a student. Then Egypt as a student after my third year.

After graduation, I spent several months traipsing through Asia. So many indelible memories. So much experience and learning – mostly good.

I am leaving my country again. This time, on a more permanent basis. We cannot predict the future with flawless accuracy but we can make some educated guesses.

For me that means the next few years will be spent among my continent mates directly to our South. Living in the USA at this juncture in history is an ongoing daily education. I won’t make a qualitative call on what I’m learning there.

Travel brings you home with new eyes. You see everything that was familiar and there before but differently somehow.

It is easy for me to appreciate the old song, “How you gonna keep ‘em down on the farm after they’ve seen Pa-ree?” Travel was like an addiction where the more I did it, the more I craved. I deemed it a healthy addiction and only now see the cravings diminishing somewhat.

Hours from now, I’ll be winging my way South to rejoin my husband and put this country in the rearview mirror for awhile.

When the jet place departs, I fully expect my bags to be packed and ready to go.

As ready as I’ll ever be at any rate.

House Keeping

I am enticed by and enjoy fine TV British dramas such as Downton Abbey and the older, but venerable PBS stalwart, Upstairs, Downstairs.

Prominent in every cast of characters is the terse and tight-lipped housekeeper who reigns over the various house servants in her domain with an implacable and impeccable air of quiet authority. She perpetually carried a faint air of disapproval and danger. Cross her at your peril.

The skill of keeping a house used to be a marketable trade. Right up there with plumber and electrician and carpenter. Mind you, when English country manor houses were roughly the same square footage as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, considerable management skill was required.

Keeping an English manor house would have been the origin of the modern day skillset of project management and logistics. Admission to the hallowed halls of keeping a great house usually started with apprenticeship.

Emerging housekeepers started their careers at a young age starting out with ignominious job titles in ignominious jobs: scullery maid, house servant, kitchenmaid, chamber attendant, scullion.

You worked up to the post of housekeeper, if you ever did, and were not waylaid by marriage and babies. I can only imagine the degree of skullduggery and political finesse required to succeed in that post. Part military strategist and part politician. The rules of conduct and the standards were much higher and more inflexible than they are generally today.

But a young man or woman who “went into service” could comfortably rely on – if they obeyed the rules of conduct and consistently met the required standards – a “career for life.”

In a similar vein, I once met a bright and lively thirteen year old German girl aiming for a career as a waitress. I was her colleague for a summer in a massive German resort hotel in the middle of the Rhine River Valley’s wine country.

I was amazed that the German school system had young people choose and start planning for a lifelong career at such a tender age. It seemed to me that she was going to miss out on a lot of life adventures by tying herself into a career path.

My attitude, I now realize, was the perspective of an entitled young North American woman who was reaping the rich rewards of a generous post-feminist establishment. I was a young woman living through the age of affirmative action.

As society was test driving the radical notion that women could, indeed, perform tasks equal to their male counterparts, you saw the rise of courses like “powder puff” mechanics (in large bright pink lettering on every poster) aimed at teaching women to keep their car in top fit condition. Imagine.

What I came to realize was that I took for granted the career opportunities I had with seemingly boundless economic rewards that were specifically tied to the early 70s and the Zeitgeist of that particular juncture in history.

So when I hired young people recently to “deep clean” my house, I got a first hand look at how sad and low the general standards of housekeeping have fallen. Deep cleaning now may mean wiping down counters but not taking toothpicks into greasy nooks and crannies.

Fridge handles get wiped down but if the greasy residue remains, no one hauls out a Magic Eraser. I saw no one using hydrogen peroxide to bubble away food crud.

Houses need love as much, if not more, than other inanimate objects. Like your car. If you ignore these objects and cease giving them love (which is generally called “maintenance”), it doesn’t take long for a house to start complaining. And eventually, to start failing and then falling apart.

Having the required skills to identify problems in a house is training that usually only comes with experience. If your parents haven’t engaged you in the basics of how to fix a leaky drain or clean out air ducts, you are likely to bump into some unpleasantness when you first start managing your own house. The learning curve can be mighty steep and ruthless.

I sometimes feel I’ve had it all thrown at me in my “house keeping” journey. The foundation that cracked mid-winter and flooded the basement bedrooms. The toilet flapper that stuck in the up position and occasioned at $1500 water bill.

The ongoing battle with critters who feel completely entitled to settling into my lodgings. They burrow through walls and wires and appliances in their ceaseless quest to find a safe and happy home for their young’uns. Not unlike us, if I can see past my anger to admit that.

So I am not exactly advocating that “housekeeping” be brought back as a laudable ambition for young women today. But I am saying they should at least deliberately arm themselves with the skills to keep a house in top working condition.

There is no guarantee that Prince Charming is going to know what to do when a breaker blows. You had best make sure that you do.