Saying Goodbye

I hadn’t seen him in over ten years.

A casualty of a divorce. But he lived close by and every time I drove by his house (which was just about everyday), I thought of him and his wife.

Uncle Ken

He was an electronics  geek, enjoyed music, his family, and treated his wife like she walked on water.

He loved Bo Schembechler and he passionately followed Michigan football every year. He knew many facts about the team, and if he didn’t know them, he made some up. But you never knew he made them up, unless you really knew Michigan football like he did.  It took me many years to figure this out.

His sister and he lived under “weird” circumstances during their childhood years. His father left his mother to marry her sister. His dad started a new family and left him behind. For seventeen years. It was always very, very sad. But he rose above it and stayed positive and never showed bitterness. Which he rightfully had a reason to be bitter. Maybe this is why he placed his family above all else.

I can’t say that I will miss him anymore than I already miss the entire family. I haven’t seen any of them in a long time. A casualty of divorce.

Apple

It is time.  A new season for the cabin.

What will it bring this year? What memories will it hold from last year and the year before?

What ancient childhood fantasies are revealed again at “Bernie’s Cabin”. Bernie and his wife Judy are long gone from the cabin. They wouldn’t recognize it if they saw it today. There never was a fire pit, nor Adirondack chairs. Let alone, colorful Adirondack chairs.

An addition was built on and it now has a beautiful fireplace and many wide windows that allow  sights of the surrounding forest as it displays the seasons and always the deer. Our mom lives on in the deer. She isn’t able to be with us anymore. If she could, she would be so happy that me and my sister and my brother stay close when we are at the cabin.

Connections with the neighbor, our cousin, have deepened. He and his family relax in the woods during the summer at their house next door. They invite us over for some home-cooking. Breakfasts are the best. In the month of June we pick blueberries in the open field behind their cabin and we have blueberry pancakes.

I promised myself not to write about food and look where I am with this. I have to go eat something now.

Fireflies and Frogs

How is it that I always have too much to do with never enough time? Why is it that I like to just be home, lounging around with my dog at my side and a cup of coffee close by watching fireflies at night while the frogs call for mates? Is this what human nature is all about? Is it a constant fight to get up and do things?

I like to go to the cabin and lounge around there too. Of course the dog always wants a walk, so I give her a walk. The cabin has a fire pit and I like to lounge around at the fire pit too. With coffee. Sometimes a glass of Merlot.

How is it that I have accomplished so much in my life with this longing to just be home chillin’? Two children, two former husbands, two grandchildren (and another on the way). I think I’ve been a good mom (I didn’t say great), obviously a bad wife (maybe because I don’t like to cook or give back/foot rubs), and an ok grandma. Both of my grandkids live far away. I’m not good about sending them stuff all the time. I do get them stuff for birthdays and Christmas. I try to carry at least one recent picture of them, but I don’t like to show them around. I feel like it may be rubbing salt in another’s wound.

I have an Associates Degree, two Bachelor’s Degrees, two Master’s Degrees, and am beginning a new career in writing. I am in health care and in education.

I play the guitar, and led worship for a single’s group for five years. I play piano and managed to play at Meadowbrook a while back with 100 other pianists.

All of this accomplishment has been on my own. I don’t have anyone giving me a leg up anywhere. I don’t know somebody who knows somebody. Some people just seem to fall into really cool jobs that pay well. I don’t. I struggle and fret and hope and wish and persist.

Life is so unfair. I am glad it is because I don’t deserve half of what I have.

Come on baby Camellia. Your grandma frog is waiting.

Through the Last Doorway

Lori is frantic. Running fast down a hallway of dim overhead lights surrounded by speckled ceiling ties and sprinkler heads every two feet. The floor is carpeted so her footsteps are muffled. Her predator’s steps are loud though and match the rhythm of hers.

All along her predictive sense had steered her to the belief that this skinny, wavy-haired woman who was now chasing her was at the center of this whole mess. “How many had been butchered? It didn’t matter that they were street people, they were still people.”

Writing v Eating

I’m torn today between two topics. Perhaps I can find a way to link them so I can write about them both.

I overeat and I have been out of control this way for the past ten years. I’ve gained and lost significant amounts of weight and have experienced all of the embarrassing uncomfortable issues that come with weight gain. It is less often that I have experienced the issues of weight loss.

I don’t know what changed in me that has perpetuated this situation. I’ve gotten older, I’ve been through your average life disappointments – divorce, death of my mom, a new job, and yet I struggle moment by moment with this all-consuming pattern of comforting myself with food.

So often it is said “it’s not what your eating, it’s what’s eating you” but I don’t buy that. I strongly believe it is related to genetic makeup. When I stay away from carbohydrates – I have the strength of steel to avoid food. But, if I stay away from carbs too long, I become ravenous for them and begin to eat unhealthy once again. The scientist in me says this is related to insulin production. My father’s incessant craving for sweets when he wasn’t drinking a fifth of Schenley’s whiskey on a daily basis had to be caused by insulin production. Can it be that some of us have a wayward insulin gene that overproduces when we see food?

Dr. David Kessler breaks down overeating by dividing the mechanism in two: eating and the desire to eat. Both processes involve separate mechanisms in the brain. He describes opioids as the brain chemical that gives food its pleasure and dopamine as the great motivator to get the food.

OK, so maybe the insulin was a good thought, but is it’s production in the brain controlled by opioids?

According to Dr. Kessler in his book “The end of overeating”, to change our behavior and defeat the absolute pleasure sensation driven by dopamine we have a brief window: a second of control where we can say yes or no to a food. If we say yes, we gain our instant gratification (and calories). If we say no, we need to engage in a competing behavior. Did I have competing behaviors before I began experiencing weight gain? Whatever they might have been, they are gone. New pleasurable behaviors are required. Now.

Perhaps this is my link to eating and writing.

Writing is a pleasurable behavior that gives me great satisfaction. The entire process from beginning to the end keeps my hands and mind busy typing and searching for the perfect word or story or plot. My focus is diverted from the yummy, mouth-watering food item I am about to eat. (Note to self: NEVER write about food.) I have found that as I develop my characters, plots, objectives and ideas, I can go anywhere in the universe, appear on any talk show, work at any profession, have as much money as I want or need. I can weigh what I want too.

And if no one else in the world reads a thing I write – it doesn’t matter.  I can have all the accolades I will ever need written in my stories.

On the Cliffs of the Mediterranean Sea

Sweet Books

One of my favorite authors is Leo Tolstoy. His word placement makes me want to exclaim a loud “yes” as he gets feelings, thoughts, and settings exact. His plots are complex and his characters are detailed. He is a timeless genius.

Contemporary authors present compelling books, but more on a formulaic basis: John Grisham or Patricia Cornwell are two such novelists. Their lead characters move through fast-paced thrillers that are believable and offer the excitement and intrigue required to take the reader out of their languid, everyday lives.

To write like Tolstoy is lofty and would require the zap of a lightning bolt to my brain to reshuffle my neurons, but to write using a formula doesn’t necessarily require such a drastic charge. It does require the discipline of practice and more practice. Reading authors, surmising what works and what does not. Learning language and writing, writing, and writing. Is this how Grisham and like authors found their successful formula? Is their success purposeful or accidental?

Whether the story is written in the superb configurations of words as Tolstoy arranges or the extreme interest of character and story of formulaic novelists, both are stories that hold my interest.

Upon completion of a novel, I feel that I have gone on a journey – a journey that is uncomfortable at times, but not unbearable. One that I could possibly see happening to me in my life. Reading a novel is my escape from drudgery for some time out of  my day.

Since I enjoy writing, I need to find the formula for telling a successful story. I can open a new type of magic to my day – escape to lands, worlds, universes that are new and hold the possibilities of anything I can imagine. I can create  scenarios that are a little uncomfortable at times, or scenes  that are very comfortable and nice – living in my home on the Nile or on the rocky cliffs of the Mediterranean sea. I don’t even know if there are cliffs along the Mediterranean sea, but in my story, they can be. I can invigorate my life through my character’s lives.

Afterall, being a med tech provides an honest, decent living, but streaking urine cultures for eight hours is akin to counting the number of cracks in the sidewalk as I circle the neighborhood on my daily walk.

Indefatigable

I keep waiting for something to happen that will snap me out of this perpetual drudgery through life. I have managed to distract myself by keeping super busy, but a turn of events has given me back available time to think. And so I move through each day doing just that: thinking about what might have been…

How would my life be different now if I had gone to airline hostess school like I had planned right out of high school? Would I have been killed in a plane crash? Would I have met a pilot and married? Would I now be a pilot? Would I still live in Michigan?

How would I be today had I tenaciously gone to med school after realizing that was my ultimate job? Would I hate it? Would I even know my daughters who I would have left behind while enduring 24/7 training?

Would I even have my daughters? I can’t imagine life without them so I can no longer think about what might have been.

I must walk my dog who is staring at me with the saddest eyes on the earth. I need to get up and move through the day trying to live the life I have with joy. I will continue to wait for the magic that will someday find me. As I wait, I take the steps, albeit small, to begin finding my life. I’ve dodged it for too many years…

Rainy Day

It doesn’t matter what the weather is outside, the basset hound wants a walk. There is a gentle, warm rain today. We will go out and circle the neighborhood.    Raking up dead leaves, cleaning up backyards, washing windows, taking down Christmas lights: the blueness of the past three months is slowly leaving the neighborhood. We know it will  leave my house any day now.

I must remember to wipe off her belly when we get back. She likes to wipe it on my white duvet with the pretty green flowers.

Problems and Solutions

The ducks have been hanging around the pond for over a week now. It is spring and the time for building nests is here. The time for eggs and new life.

The last pair of ducks that built their nest in the yard had twelve chicks. They waddled into the pond. It was very inspirational. I opened the gate so that they could get out of the yard knowing that they could not survive in my little pond. The mother duck thought so too because she walked them out and away.

I didn’t have a basset hound at that time. Now, Daisey, resides in and out of the house, free to sniff all about the yard. She is fascinated by ducks and charges them whenever they are in the yard.

Do I let the ducks build the nest in the yard – hopefully artfully dodging the basset?

Word Pictures

It is simple but so complicated. Simple in that each story has a problem and a solution. Complicated in that each story has characters, places, and events that must merge and flow as the story is told. Painting pictures with words.

Writing is powerful because words are the most powerful force that exists.