Category: RIP

The Vigil

I hate waiting. It is a character flaw.

I should be a model of patience by now.

I am not.

It is uncertainty that bothers me most.

I don’t trust easily. I am a small “c” control freak. If a job needs to be done well, I need to do it. Etc.

I could analyze ad infinitum how I evolved this way but I think it is pretty textbook. Chaotic childhood. Addicted parents. Chronic upheaval and instability.

To not become something of a control freak in such an environment would be a little crazy in its own right.

So even if waiting for what I expect will be a positive outcome, I dither.

I harbor the anxiety that the proverbial rug will be pulled out from under my proverbial feet.

Op. cit. childhood.

The trick is to manage the anxiety of waiting and not the other way around, letting anxiety manage you.

I sometimes think of the frightened bird hiding in the reeds in a vignette from the classic Disney animated film, Fantasia.

Instead of keeping her head down and staying put, the bird panics. She flies out of her hiding space into a hunter’s clear shot. I had similar metaphorical experiences in my life. Many instances when things might have gone much better had I simply kept my head down and my mouth shut.

But no. Anxiety is a powerful driver. And with a nervous system deeply gouged with life threatening memories of a danger-filled childhood, it is not an easy emotion to quell in emotional heat.

Sometimes the emotional game in my head was akin to playing defense in a basketball game. Feinting. Parrying. Watching for one move or another on someone else’s part. Blocking constantly, frantically, and in this analogy, one’s own emotions to boot. I already need a shower.

Waiting drags at the nerves. It forces you to think or, at the very least, spend time alone with your thoughts. While it might benefit you to think about anything else but what you are waiting on, that is easier said than done.

I remember back to memorable waiting periods in my life. For grades to be posted. For a boyfriend to call. For the outcome of a job interview. For my children to be born. For my father to pick me up. Ordinary life events made tolerable or intolerable in direct relation to the extent of my anxiety and distrust of life.

Let go, the self-help books say. Let go and let god, the 12 step programs say. Let go, the religious tracts say and, if you fall, god will pick you up and you will fly. That is a lot of faith to invest in reassuring platitudes. If, and especially when, life has given you plenty of personal evidence to the contrary.

I have slowly learned positive benefits of cultivating patience. It makes waiting easier. It lessens the gap between triumph and disaster. As Kipling counseled in his poem If, I have learned to “treat those two imposters just the same.” Well, similarly at any rate.

A friend from long ago suffered from a rare and capricious form of cancer. She traveled as far as Sweden to the only clinic in the world that specialized in treatment of her condition. She wrote about waiting. For test results. For updates. For word of developments on her condition. Her writing was full of frustration for what she couldn’t control. She sounded like a lot of us managing much less difficult circumstances.

My friend died. And that was the end of her uncertainty about everything. Everything ends eventually. Death is so final, after all.

It seems that is the trick of life and living. We do what we have to do while we have to do it until one day we don’t. Or can’t. And then really, really can’t.

We can be patient and learn to put up with life’s uncertainties or we can act out along the way like overtired toddlers. The end result is the same. How we handle these inevitable frustrations is what informs the quality of the journey. That is going to be a lot more important to you later than you may realize now. Trust me.

I have been that peevish toddler in the past having a temper tantrum and throwing shade at every person I perceived as an impediment to my goals and wishes. I have also hung back and talked with others in the queue misery bitching about our shared calamity. We often got a laugh out of it and a shared – if temporary – sense of connection. It was the spoonful of sugar that made the line move faster.

So today I wait again. For an uncertain outcome. In a dire situation. I am better at discerning what I can control and what I can’t. The person for whom I am holding vigil is on their own journey. I am simply a fellow traveler.

On that note, I am going to go top up my coffee. Completely within my control.

A chore utterly without frustration.

Unless the coffee is lukewarm.

I hate lukewarm coffee.

Letting Go of the Reins

One day I will be taken. I don’t know how or when, of course. All I know is that leaving Earth – the only home I am familiar with – is inevitable.

It is a mildly discomfiting feeling but doesn’t consume my daily thoughts. Except some days, it does.

Does death scare me? I suppose so, yes, on some level. In the same way going on a trip to any unknown destination scares me. More nervousness than fear. Traveling is a hassle. There are bound to be nerves. Any trip causes internal and external upheaval. What do I pack for starters?

I have lived long enough and traveled often enough to know that wherever I go, there I am. Exotic destinations and white sandy beaches stretching off into the distance are alluring. I appreciate them in direct correlation to the vantage point of the mood and headspace I am in. Over my lifetime, positive and negative internal states have been many and various. My internal state always mattered in my recollection of the experience more than any external situation I was in. I could appreciate or adapt myself to the degree that I was capable of reacting to or appreciating it.

One stunning travel memory was the beach at Hikkaduwa, Sri Lanka. Local boys brought us freshly cut spears of pineapple that dripped with juice and had the mouth feel of biting into heavy whipped cream. I snorkeled in shallow waters off the beaches there. I nearly inhaled water amazed and distracted by the orderly kaleidoscope of colors among fish wending their way through equally colorful coral reefs.

When I think of travel experiences that stayed with me, I think about the synchronicity between my inner self and what was going on outside me. Often nothing. Standing at a rock cairn in the Himalayas, I watched clouds gambol across the peak of Mt. Everest in the distance. No hurry, no drama. Just mountains and clouds being mountains and clouds. Just being.

I often try to reconcile the disparity between growth and stagnation. It is said life on Earth is largely for spiritual education. Damned if I know exactly how that works. Damned if I have ever been able to fully recognize and internalize graduation markers from one “grade” to the next.

I only know by comparison that my values, hopes, and ambitions are radically different than those of a younger me. Younger me was largely consumed by the drive for survival. Older me wonders more often what survival’s end will be like. I often reflect on the enduring shame and distress certain actions or situations created in me as a youth. Those situations would never happen now and the memories cause me pain and pause. Maybe that is the point. That feels like learning.

I have often said, however, that many life lessons I learned I would rather have read in a book. Were the lessons of devastation of loss, humiliation, upheaval and searing emotional pain really necessary for the ultimate good of my eternal soul? That seems doubtful. I spent a lot of time wondering if those crushing lessons were simply a case of me being the a—hole. The uncomfortable answer was often yes.

Life for me has been like some talented, untrained filly full of spirit and energy and bumping into its mother and the paddock rails out of sheer, unbridled enthusiasm. The filly needed to grow up, become trained, focus that energy and spirit in a controlled way to be of any value to the herd or its owner. And protect its mother’s ribs. Otherwise it would simply grow bigger and continue to be an unruly, undisciplined horsehole that outgrew its cute phase and was eventually labeled delinquent and dangerous. At which point, it would become isolated and avoided. I’ve been there.

As a child in Pony Club being trained myself, I would often let go of the reins. It signaled the end of the lesson. It was the moment where riders relaxed and the horse relaxed, too. We often caught flak from instructors if we let the reins go in a field where the first thing the horse did was start grazing. That seemed to bother the instructors terribly but I never really got that. I always thought it was a nice treat and reward for a horse that has just worked hard and put up with your childish incompetence for the preceding hour.

On a horse trek across the Andes, I relaxed the reins at certain points when I couldn’t possibly imagine what my instructions to the horse could constructively add to the situation. The group of fellow riders edged along narrow mountain trails within way too close proximity and clear sight of cliffs plunging thousands of feet down the mountain. If the horse took any misstep whatsoever, we would both free fall to our deaths.

It finally occurred to me that the horse did not want to die either. It had crossed these pathways many more times than I had, after all. It needed to be sure – and was likely very sure – of its own footing. Self-preservation is not confined to the human species. I had utterly no control over this animal in that moment. I loosened the reins and gave over my trust to this steady, wordless equine. It worked out, of course, or you wouldn’t be reading this blog post!

Facing death with an attitude of peace would seem to mean arriving at that portal having come to terms with most of the problems and relationships life threw at you. Combined with surrender for what you could not and cannot control any longer, which is a form of grace. I have lately been learning that lesson in real time.

When facing a situation where you have explored every option, you have given a project or person your all, you have asked all the questions, done all the readings, shaken the curtains for every last remaining bit of insight until, one day, for no discernible reason, you let go of any control over the outcome. Where the illusion of control was deployed as a survival strategy, it becomes obvious you have little to no control whatsoever. Control over getting the dishes done, yes, of course. But not for the ultimate outcome of life’s trajectory.

In the vernacular and wisdom of the 12 step groups, one ultimately decides to “Let go and let god.” I assume and hope that will be my conclusion on my deathbed, or death sidewalk, or death seashore or airplane wherever I happen to be at the time I cross “the great divide.”

While it causes anxiety to let go of control, it also comes with a certain sense of relief. There are burdens worth setting down along the journey of life. To surrender to forces greater than you are. Surrender undoubtedly comes at no more important or impactful time than at the end of that journey.

Sounds like relief to me. At the end of the ride, let the damn horse eat all the fresh grass he wants, say I. He’s earned it.

The Last Post … Sort Of

Happy anniversary to me.

I started this blog a year ago today. I wasn’t sure then whether I would successfully make it to today or not. Publication wise.

But I did. I published a post every day of varying quality and length for a whole year.

Mission accomplished.

Do you know the haunting musical lament The Last Post? Usually played on a trumpet and followed by two minutes of silence, it is meant to honor those who lost their lives in the Great War.

It is a standard offering at the annual Canadian Remembrance Day services on November 11th across the country. (Known as Veteran’s Day in the US.)

It is a musical thread of continuity that, when we hear it, can snap us back to a particular time or place.

My strongest memory of The Last Post was hearing it played at my father’s funeral in 2005. A couple of his Legion buddies showed up at the service to pay their respects.

When the eulogy and all other elements of the service had been delivered, to close the ceremony, they played The Last Post to send Dad onwards.

The two minute scratchy trumpet solo was played on a handheld cassette tape player held aloft for better hearing by the gathered mourners. It was both moving and comical.

It could have been a scene in a TV series about an old soldier who had lived and died in the countryside among unsophisticated folk who were salt of the earth. And a touch salty, too, if memory serves.

In the end, all that mattered was that Dad’s old buddies showed up to send him off. The low quality of the recording notwithstanding. They showed respect to an old veteran who had done his bit when called upon to do so.

None of us really knows what happens when we die. It is – outside birth itself – life’s biggest mystery. There is no end of speculation about consciousness continuing after we die. Maybe.

I am inclined to think consciousness does continue in some form even though I have no clue what that form might be. Energy doesn’t die only transmogrifies. (Love that word~!)

Reincarnation and its variants are a preferable alternate to the “once and done” end of life theory that so many realists expound and insist upon with just as little evidence for their certainty.

If we don’t really know anyway, what harm is there in believing the more comforting scenario?And then there is that Ouija board session that utterly convinced me there is another side. That is a story for another time however.

I say farewell today in a similar low-key fashion. No big production or insights to share. Just a wistful sense of gratitude and completion in achieving a goal.

I’ve promised to share posts occasionally going forward as and when moved to do so. If a new writing venture develops, I’ll share that news with you, too.

Next week, I am going to a writing retreat. Today and tomorrow, I will rest and see what fills in the space this blog occupied in my life all this year.

Other than that, no concrete plans. Blessedly.

As with most aspects of life, the future is not completely in my control anyway.

I think I’ll just settle in to enjoy the ride wherever it leads.

Thanks for following along.

I’ll likely pop up in your inbox now and then as promised.

We’ll see what happens next

Maggymac out, with much gratitude for the ride and the company.

Plus One Year’s Eve

Well, folks. I made it. This is my 366th post in a row having officially started writing this blog one year ago tomorrow. Happy anniversary to me.

Funny how anniversaries and life just seem to creep up on you. No fanfare or fireworks. Just progression.

I started this blog as a place to gather my thoughts while I committed to writing a book. There has been a book sitting in me for years, or so I’ve been told. I finally wanted to let it out.

So did that book get written? That depends on how you look at it. I wrote enough copy to fill a book certainly. But the technical aspects of book writing were never brought to bear on this project.

A beginning, middle and end to start. No. I chose to share my thoughts and insights into a range of eclectic topics as they arose or came to my attention. In that sense, I honored my own unfolding process and not a publisher’s checklist.

It has been an opportunity to share wisdom I’ve gleaned over the years through the writings of others.

It has been an opportunity to explore and share where I came from and how I healed from it.

It has given me a chance to publicly grieve the loss and raise up some people I admired.

I have a better sense of what matters to me and what I will no longer tolerate. Peace is top item on the list of goals these days. I have turned my back on drama.

This has not been a journal. I’ve done that before. In journals, I shared my deepest fears and insecurities. I bitched and wailed and generally pursued a story line of “woe is me.” This blog was deliberately something other than that.

I distilled the key learnings and strategies that kept me going on my “woe is me” days. I shared what I did to endure and prevail over “the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.” I worked at learning to forgive myself.

The gap between intellect and emotion can be vast. Such is the process of learning and growth. All of us seem to be slaves to unconscious programming we work our whole lives to understand and overcome.

I have carved out a little niche. An intellectual mini-garden that I can nurture and visit frequently. I don’t yet know what my next steps are. I will write a final post tomorrow just for the symmetry of ending on the same date I started last year.

I will once again this year attend the Getting Away to Write workshop in New Smyrna Beach, Florida next week. A geographic coda to this writing exercise as I started this blog there last year.

I must thank all of you who subscribed and read what I wrote. The comments were usually spot on. Insightful and helpful. The likes were encouraging and kept me motivated. I’ll pop up again from time to time in your inbox like other bloggers.

It’s time now for coffee and morning meditation. Time to ground myself and prepare for the day. It will be deliberately low-key as most of my days are lately. Such a welcome gift.

I love living this way. Forgiving myself as well as forgiving those who trespassed against me. Marinating in the memories of a lifetime and looking back with gratitude. Enjoying the living environment I’ve created whilst living with someone I love who loves me back.

Above all else, I’m certain that my journey – like a billion other journeys taking place in the world out there at this moment – is but a single cell in the vast corpus of life on our planet. Both unique and utterly ordinary.

Whatever is ahead, I plan to enjoy the remainder of the ride to the best of my ability.

Thank you for sharing part of the journey with me.

Energetically Speaking

The mysteries of energy – what it is and how it works – are largely beyond me.

Personally, I know when I have an abundance of it. And I really know when I don’t.

I accept that energy is all around us and supports us and all other living things. Naturalists might interpret that universal energetic flow as god at work.

But beyond that superficial understanding and my reliance on electrical outlets to power up whatever device I need to use, my understanding of energy is scant.

Eastern religions have a deep and complex understanding of energy. They understand how the energy in us is connected to a larger energetic system.

Some Westerners have clued in and try to apply the knowledge of those belief systems to our own philosophical frameworks.

From this, many Westerners have adopted and follow the dictates of balancing their chakras and pursuing a yoga practice. In Far Eastern culture, internal energetic pathways in the body are called meridians which are the channels through which chi (life energy) flows.

This belief system attributes a lot of suffering and illness to blockages in energy flow. Acupressure and acupuncture evolved as methods to unblock the meridians. By doing so, the body’s own healing energy can take over and bring it back into balance, or a state of wellness.

It all seems like delicate balancing act to me to achieve and maintain a state of wellness in ourselves and on our planet. Many capitalists don’t think this way. Nature is seen strictly as a resource to exploit.

We are all paying a high price for that attitude with climate change and increasingly extreme weather events around the world.

Likely, we have all heard the analogy of how the butterfly flapping its wings can impact events on the other side of the world.

I will rely on this quote by Catherine McKenzie to better explain where that philosophy comes from:

“They say that if a butterfly flaps its wings in the Amazonian rain forest, it can change the weather half a world away.

Chaos theory.

What it means is that everything that happens in this moment is an accumulation of everything that’s come before it. Every breath. Every thought. There is no innocent action.

Some actions end up having the force of a tempest. Their impact cannot be missed. Others are the blink of an eye. Passing by unnoticed. Perhaps only God knows which is which.

All I know today is that you can think that what you’ve done is only the flap of a butterfly wing, when it’s really a thunderclap. And both can result in a hurricane.”

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/10523011-they-say-that-if-a-butterfly-flaps-its-wings-in

That would appear to put an enormous amount of responsibility upon individuals to consider and monitor how their actions could affect outside events.

I believe there were great cultures that did do that as part of their inherent belief system. First Nation tribes believed spirit was in every living thing. They treated the Earth they lived on and the animals that were sacrificed for their survival accordingly.

I think it is a fair comment to say that sensibility was eradicated at the end of the nineteenth century as effectively as First Nations people and the buffalo were.

All to say, I superficially understand the dictates of maintaining my own energy supplies. I pursue practices and activities that I believe support that effort.

Mostly I have taken up certain practices through a zig zag process of traia and error over the years.

Yoga helps unblock parts of my body that are tight and tied into knots, essentially by tying itself into knots. No wonder so many Westerners think yoga is weird.

I have had acupuncture when no other modality seemed to improve that nagging bursitis in my right scapula. I don’t well understand how acupuncture works, only that it has and does. That is sufficient to my purposes when I am in chronic pain.

They say that the more you know, the less you know. Or as more accurately expressed by Aristotle: “The more you know, the more you know you don’t know.”

Regarding life energy, flow, Spirit and interconnectedness among all living things, that is precisely my experience. I know a little bit about a lot of things.

I am in a chronic state of tension as a result. I realize I will never reach that carrot of fully understanding the fundamental mysteries of life: where life started, what life is and what keeps us and life constantly moving forward.

I do know I appreciate the unrelenting quest and happily sacrifice a fair amount of my life energy to seek answers to those multitude of things I do not understand.

I pray for the sustained energy to keep me pursuing that quest for as long as Nature/Spirit/god permits.

Pablo Neruda Said This

I agree with him.

“You start dying slowly;

if you do not travel,

if you do not read,

If you do not listen to the sounds of life,

If you do not appreciate yourself.

You start dying slowly:

When you kill your self-esteem,

When you do not let others help you.

You start dying slowly;

If you become a slave of your habits,

Walking everyday on the same paths…

If you do not change your routine,

If you do not wear different colors

Or you do not speak to those you don’t know.

You start dying slowly:

If you avoid to feel passion

And their turbulent emotions;

Those which make your eyes glisten

And your heart beat fast.

You start dying slowly:

If you do not risk what is safe for the uncertain

If you do not go after a dream

If you do not allow yourself

At least once in your lifetime

To run away from sensible advice

Don’t let yourself die slowly

Do not forget to be happy!

~ Pablo Neruda

The Nature of Things

There is a pivotal scene at the end of Orson Welles’ cinematic masterpiece, Citizen Kane.

This rich and powerful man has destroyed many people’s lives in pursuing his ruthless ambitions. Now he is on his deathbed.

The only word Citizen Kane utters is, “Rosebud.” SPOILER ALERT: Rosebud is the name of his snow sled. In the scene that follows, we see workmen tossing it into a blast furnace along with a lot of other seemingly useless stuff.

Here we see that on the brink of his impending death, the protagonist Citizen Kane goes back in his mind to the freedom and joy he once had and enjoyed in the simpler time of his childhood.

I, too, had items of deep sentimental value that were my constant companions when I was a child. I clung to them then as children seeking security often do. Much like Linus and his famous blue blanket, my “pinkie blanket” was my constant companion when I was a toddler.

This cuddly soft blanket was a 100% wool Kenworth in a light shade of pink. It had been given as a Christmas present from my paternal grandmother in the year I was born.

There was a darker backstory behind that gift. For reasons known only to her, my grandmother refused to see me when I was taken to visit her shortly after my birth. Who knows why? She was pretty crazy best of times.

My father – the youngest of three boys who came late to fatherhood – was devastated by her rejection. And as terrible sadness often presents in hurt people, Dad was deeply angry.

When a gift box arrived a few days before Christmas, it was all my mother could do to keep Dad from taking it to his mother’s house and throwing it on her front porch.

But he was talked out of it and didn’t. It turned out to be a lucky call. My grandmother dropped dead of a heart attack a few days later on December 23rd in the same year I was born.

Had that gift been angrily rejected and returned, my mother worried Dad would have taken on all of the guilt for causing his mother’s death. As it was, he seemed guilty enough for just breathing the same air as she did.

It is more than a bit ironic, then, that the pinkie blanket became my constant companion and primary source of comfort as I grew a little older. I now wonder how Dad must have felt seeing me drag it around all the time after the drama surrounding its origins.

I had a white toy dog, too, who was very important to me, too. He was most reminiscent of some breed of schnauzer or terrier. He walked forward shakily on his four stiff legs when you pressed a button in his neck. Though the name on the sales tag said, “Knee High,” I called him “Highknee.”

The perceptive and Yiddish speakers among you will note his name is pronounced and so might easily have been spelled “h-e-i-n-i-e.” Which could have been pretty accurate as that is about how tall he was in relation to my backside back then.

After years of upheaval, both Highknee and my pinkie blanket were lost in the mists of many, many moves. Yet, the comfort and companionship and pleasure they afforded me when I most needed them still lingers in the recesses of my childhood memories.

Come to think of it, I have cycled through various artifacts and icons of comfort over time. They varied. I toted around a huge pink elephant with neon bright psychedelic patterned ears a teenage boyfriend gave me until it fell apart.

The same boyfriend gave me a blue and cherry pink reversible satin comforter. It also eventually succumbed to the vagaries of age and a cannibalistic washing machine.

These days, I take comfort from a variety of beautiful things. A sitting Buddha statue sits serenely in my bespoke mango Asian room.

Articles of my children’s clothing from when they were infants and toddlers are socked away in dresser drawers and fawned over occasionally. To be taken out and used again, perhaps, when my children have little ones of their own. If wishes were horses ….

I have a multitude of candles I keep stored away. When I want to bring light and spirit into a room, I bring them out and light them.

Certain artworks I’ve collected evokes special memories. The art has not always come from a place I’ve been to except in my mind’s eye. Still those pieces comfort me by emotional and geographic association.

I treasure a few other special artifacts for the positive memories they bring up, too. But I know I don’t need them. They are luxuries.

I have lived long periods of my life keeping no reminders of my past lives on display around me. The artifacts of my material life was often put in storage, for example, if I was moving around the country for a contract or some other work engagement.

Most of these desirable “things” are “wants” in my life, not “needs.” As if on cue, some material item often comes up or comes back to me when I most need comfort. Not necessarily the same item or in the same form as the original.

But close enough in shape or form to evoke the memories of comfort I needed when I was younger and more vulnerable. Those memories often rise again to comfort me in adulthood.

I have white Kenmore wool blankets now. Highknee has been replaced by a tortoiseshell cat named Nalita.

I am as grateful for the memories of comfort I had in childhood as I was for the items themselves. I am more than grateful for the living breathing things that give me comfort now.

My husband. My friends. My daughter. My cat. My house plants.

If we are lucky, we eventually learn that things – no matter how luxurious or expensive or rare or treasured – are, after all, just things. If we are very lucky, we learn to comfort ourselves in the midst of having nothing material at all.

Vellichor

Isn’t that a beautiful word? Want to know what it means? Do you think you know how to pronounce it?

Pronunciation is easy: velly – core. And it means this:

“The pensive nostalgia and temporality of used bookstores; the feeling evoked by the scent of old books or paper.”

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/vellichor

This word and its definition triggered a thousand pleasant memories. Of the library at the University of New Brunswick – my first alma mater. Of wonderful old bookstores I would saunter through in Toronto or London, England. There were many smaller and obscure bookstores I would happen upon in my travels that evoked similar feelings.

The feelings evoked by the ambience and smell were always the same. Comfort. Coziness. Class and certainty. Books that were old enough to emit that odor had obviously been around a while. That spoke to their longevity and value.

Vellichor is as much an emotional response as much as anything else. It evokes the Zeitgeist of a slower and simpler time. I could spend a full afternoon wandering from one section to another in a bookstore or library in search of nothing in particular.

Bookstores and libraries are designed for browsing and browse I did. For hours on end. I fear its’ passing.

“Big box” bookstores have subsumed countless numbers of small “Mom and Pop” bookstores. Indeed, that very phenomenon was the plot line (along with the eventual romantic hookup between Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks) in the 90s hit movie, You’ve Got Mail.

Ryan owned a small children’s bookstore she inherited from her mother called The Shop Around the Corner. Hanks played the “villain” Joe Fox whose family owned business was mega bookstores. (Think Chapters, and Barnes & Noble, etc.) The two unbeknown to each other business rivals meet online and strike up a romance not knowing each other’s true identities.

And that is the plot wrinkle that the movie revolves around. Two business rivals with widely divergent business philosophies. Spoiler alert: Ryan finally decides to sell the shop as the new Fox Bookstore crushes her sales. Love wins out in the end. (Why else make the movie?)

But I bet Fox Books didn’t have the vellichor of The Shop Around the Corner. That quality cannot be bought or sold. Like fine wine or delicate soft cheeses, the aroma of fusty old books must gestate and develop slowly.

Another wonderful book turned movie along the same lines was 84, Charing Cross Road. That plot centers around a twenty year correspondence between US author Helene Hanff and UK resident Frank Doel, chief buyer of Marks & Co antiquarian booksellers, located at the eponymous address in London, England.

The film featured Anne Bancroft and Anthony Hopkins with a sweet and simple tale of a long friendship that unfolds in letters based on the writers’ mutual love and respect for books.

A reviewer notes how much The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, a novel comprised of only letters between the characters, owes to 84, Charing Cross Road. Each book (which later became movies) ooze simplicity and charm for what I fear is becoming a bygone era.

I’m not sure anyone even has the time and patience for that type of correspondence anymore. In a world where children are no longer even taught cursive writing, it is hard to imagine that era will come again. It is a great cultural and experiential loss.

Musty libraries and bookstores account for some on my happiest memories. I didn’t have a word to describe what it was about them that I loved so much before. Now I do. Vellichor.

Wherever and whenever I find it still exists, I shall deliberately seek it out. Like a muzzled wild boar seeking out truffles. The comparison may not be particularly flattering at first glance but the urgency and intensity of the hunt is completely in synch.

Books are an addiction I have for which I have no intention of seeking a cure.

Fun At Funerals

Funerals. Bad word. Right up there with shingles, scabies, dog poop and malaria as unwanted life events. Ew.

Yet, they are inevitable. People we love will die. People we don’t love will die. Lots of people we don’t know will die. And we will die.

Here I am borrowing loosely from the LGBTQ anthem: “We’re here. We’re queer. Get used to it.” I say: “We’re here. We’re mortal. Get used to it.” Admittedly not anywhere near as mellifluous.

But are funerals the absolutely worst occasions we have to take part in? That pretty much depends on the above associations. Did you love the deceased? Did you hate the deceased while s/he was living? Did you even know him or her?

The answer to these questions will definitely inform the tone and your emotional response to the funeral you are attending. Although it begs the question, if you didn’t even know the person, what were you doing at their funeral anyway?

My mother used to regularly visit funeral homes in her home town whether she knew the deceased or not. She always stayed afterwards for the free food and baked goodies.

A nutritional mainstay of her diet for a good number of her later years actually. But this is not about my mother so I won’t go there. Not directly at any rate.

I am trying to say that not all funerals are bad. Some engender relief. Some engender gratitude for the release from pain and suffering. Some have unwelcome but noteworthy comic elements.

I have the worst funny story about my great-uncle’s funeral back in the last century. To say Great Uncle Leigh was not a religious man would have been a dramatic understatement.

He worked nearly his whole life as a logger in the backwoods of provincial New Brunswick, Canada and later as a carpenter and house builder. Leigh deftly managed to dodge the marriage and kids trap as a young man. However, as old age and decrepitude started to set in, he apparently felt it wise to give up his bachelor status.

He tossed his single lifestyle in favor of a comely widow hovering in about his age range. A comely widow whose baking and cooking skills were locally renowned. It could be said Uncle Leigh knew exactly which side his bread was buttered on.

The only gaping and discernible gap between them was Millie’s feverish commitment to God, and the Baptist church and Uncle Leigh’s religious avoidance of all of it. Not only did he avoid church as an attendee but he also avoided any of its teachings. Uncle Leigh was a proudly devout heathen through and through.

So he and the widow did the deed. Got married, I mean. Some years and many, many apple pies later, Millie passed. In due course, Leigh got older and sick and soon followed Millie on the path into Heaven’s kitchen. (Though, heathen that he was, that point is certainly debatable.)

A funeral was arranged. Without a church to call home and no preacher who knew him personally, there was no religious eulogist familiar enough with him to summarize his life and character. The pastor of Millie’s church was summoned.

Now as an audience member in the family pew, it certainly seemed to me that the ad hoc preacher did not know anything at all about what – or more precisely – who he was talking about.

Then the preacher man’s eulogy launched into a passionate anecdote about sitting – for a time – beside Uncle Leigh on his deathbed. The preacher fairly swooned as he shared his ecstatic news with the assembled gathering.

According to him, our beloved Uncle Leigh, “in his waning hours,” “had accepted salvation and the Lord Jesus Christ as his personal Savior.” Apparently this happened just as Uncle Leigh was hovering on the brink of passing over to his “final reward.”

Sitting amongst other relatives in the family pew, including my mother, I did not take this news well. The image of sweet but tough and resolute old heathen Uncle Leigh accepting the Lord Jesus Christ into his house, let alone into his bedroom and heart, hit me entirely the wrong way.

I struggled to suppress a chuckle. As the preacher droned on about the salvation of dear Uncle Leigh’s immortal soul, the rising chuckle gained momentum.

It was everything I could do not guffaw out loud, in what I knew would have been a most inappropriate and shameful outburst.

Still I was doubled over in my seat in the pew, holding my sides, rocking quietly, in an attempt to regain some self-control. At a point, I just jumped up and fled the sanctuary. The laughter exploded out of me once I was safely out of anyone’s hearing in the hall outside.

If you had actually known Uncle Leigh, the absurdity of the preacher’s announcement was too ridiculous for words. It took me several minutes to compose myself.

But compose myself I finally did. I slithered quietly back into the sanctuary and settled into my seat in the family pew – once again, the very model of grief and decorum.

The little break I took meant the funeral had moved on to another speaker, blessedly. My composure and the family’s dignity were intact.

Then, on my shoulder, I felt a gentle tap. I looked around and saw a white glove covered hand and behind that the sweetest and most compassionate-looking elderly lady with tightly curled blue hair and a tender expression of sympathy.

“There, there, dear,” she comforted me. “I know that grief can be overwhelming when you lose a dear one.” I should have been happy she completely misread the reason I fled the sanctuary.

As it happened, her overture had the unfortunate effect of forcing me to once again repress laughter bubbling up within me. Admittedly, I was pretty emotional. But in the entirely wrong way for the occasion at hand.

I smiled broadly, patted her gloved hand still on my shoulder, and whispered sincere thanks for her kindness and concern.

It may have been Uncle Leigh we gathered to bury that day and whose life we celebrated, but, in retrospect, I feel I dodged a bullet.

At the very least, I managed to save the family’s dignity and my own on that sad and sombre and august occasion.

Seriously close call.

New Year, Old Me

Hope is a wondrous thing. I’d even go so far as to say it is lifesaving.

In the face of all challenges and heartbreak, hope can rise. Bidden sometimes. At other times, it just seems to pop up. The proverbial beacon of light and direction sitting off in the distance that appears to us, seemingly out of nowhere.

I sometimes wonder how often that very scenario played out for mariners of old. In the middle of being mercilessly tossed about on savage seas with death but a rogue wave away, off in the distance, the lookout spots a lighthouse.

Hope rises. Life continues. The sailors get to live another day.

As we mark this first day of a new year in our calendar, we are similarly touched by hope for the year to come. Hope for renewal. Hope for freedom from pain – emotional and/or physical. Hope for better news. Hope for sanity and peace of mind.

It is, of course, a false construct. Today is no different than yesterday in reality. We are not Cinderella who transforms into a princess and steps into a radically altered lifestyle. Of course, at her midnight, she reverted to her previous state. But altered.

The prince she had met and dazzled set out to find her again. That particular “New Year’s Eve” did not make the changes in her life that night. They foretold them.

Change happens like that for most of us, too. Whatever deficiencies we want to address in our life often have to be faced full-on in an instant. Then the slow process of change gets underway. The outcome we want may take weeks, months or years to accomplish. Then, one day, if we’re lucky and have worked hard enough, we are there.

I had this experience with both drinking and smoking. There was a time when I could not imagine my lifestyle would ever be other than what it was. I took some sense of satisfaction in cultivating the image of a hard-working, hard-living journalist for whom alcohol and nicotine were mandatory kit in the trade. An Ernest Hemingway-compatible type of broad.

Confirmation of a pregnancy stopped smoking in its tracks. I inherited my father’s Dutch will of iron. Ditching drink took a little longer. But with almost 24 years of sobriety behind me now, I can hardly remember how or why alcohol was ever part of my life at all.

Yet through it all, I am still me. For better or worse.

I have certainly changed from my younger self. But the essence of who I am is still there. I believe it is that way for most of us. Change does not always present with glaring neon signs in our day-to-day lives. I still have laundry to fold, beds to make, meals to make and dear friends to connect with. Life goes on.

This eventuality can be a hard learning during the egocentricity of youth phase. For some that phase lasts a lifetime. When I learned the phrase “hissy fit,” I recall how mortified and impressed I was by its’ resonance. “Boo.” “Hiss.” “I don’t wanna.” Ya. That sounded pretty similar to me having a temper tantrum.

I am beginning to find some solace in the immutable fact of my own humanity. That is allowing me to ease up on myself. The big ambitions I had for my life as a youth have been abandoned or pretty much dissipated.

And oddly, I find myself these days in the exact situation I always secretly craved. A happy home life. A wonderful and satisfying marriage to a man I think is the coolest dude on Planet Earth. I had similar feelings about my beloved Yorkie, Bailey. Not that I am drawing comparisons between the two, I only mean to say that when I love someone or something, I am all in.

So I did not create a long and unwieldy and unrealistic list of New Year’s resolutions meant to kick in today. There are a few things and unhelpful habits I want to discard. There are a few things I want to do more of. Others I want to do less of.

Like watching TV news as I said recently. That activity is like voluntarily setting yourself up to develop brain fungus. Ptooey. Don’t need it. Don’t want it.

I find myself drifting back to the homely arts and wishing to strengthen my connection to nature. I want to do more of nothing and less constant of the constant unending to-do lists and busywork. It is high time.

You see life goes on with or without us. That is a hard and fundamental learning we all must get eventually. In the face of that truism, we discover the parameters of own life and what we can realistically achieve for our own happiness and that of others around us.

Peggy Lee, the legendary lounge singer from the last century, sang a song called: “Is That All There Is?”

Is that all there is?
Is that all there is?
If that’s all there is my friends, then let’s keep dancing
Let’s break out the booze and have a ball
If that’s all there is

I know what you must be saying to yourselves
“If that’s the way she feels about it, why doesn’t she just end it all?”
Oh, no. Not me
I’m not ready for that final disappointment
Cause I know just as well as I’m standing here talking to you
When that final moment comes and I’m breathing my last breath,
I’ll be saying to myself … is that all there is?

https://genius.com/Peggy-lee-is-that-all-there-is-lyrics

I’m going to follow Peggy Lee’s advice. One day, you may discover all of your hopes and dreams and expectations may sit shattered on the sidewalk outside your house.

You may be left to wonder why you lived this life at all and what it was all about. That realization has finally hit me. I’m a grain of sand on a beach. A single star in the heavens.

No matter. I have friends and some family members who love me. I love them back. I plan to keep writing and, as Peggy advises, “hope to keep dancing and having a ball.”

Minus the booze, of course.