Slept in.
Coffee.
Opened presents.
Poached eggs.
Put pot roast in oven.
Took a walk in the snow.
Ate pot roast.
That’s all I have folks, except…
…Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays.
You can still beat the clock!
Mike, Seeing-Eye dog Whitney and I are taking a train to Wisconsin tomorrow to visit our son Gus for the weekend, and while we’re away our niece Janet and her kids are staying at our place to enjoy Christmassy Chicago.
So, like so many others, Mike and I are running around packing, shopping and cleaning. In a last-minute gift rush, I managed to figure out how to send Writing Out Loud to Kindle users as an e-book. Had no idea that was even possible — the things I’ve learned since getting this new book published! It seems fairly easy to accomplish:
Okay. As Flo would say, “I’d better get cuttin’.” Happy holidays!
‘Tis the season to be merry.
And for anyone fortunate enough to live long enough, ‘tis the season to fend off, wrestle with, accept, crumble in a cloud of wadded up Kleenex, or do whatever it takes to deal with the ache we have for those who are not around to be merry anymore.
As we age, the number in the latter group grows. But practice doesn’t make perfect. It doesn’t get easier. There’s tons of advice, books, groups, but there is no grieving blueprint. Grief seems to have a life of its own, and does what it wants with us.
There are some common triggers—like the holidays, birthdays, family get-togethers, anniversaries. But it can be anything. Some little occurrence—“that’s when I would’ve phoned my mom if she were still around…” that reminds us of the void.
But there are other moments. Sometimes when I’m cooking I put music on. There’s a Todd Rundgren song that contains the lyric,
“The one that showed me kindness,
is the one who taught me kindness.”
Our son Gus got to feel the whiskers, too.
Every single time I hear it, whether I’m chopping or stirring, I can feel my dad’s razor stubble on my cheek (my dad’s five o’clock shadow tended to show up after lunch). I’d felt it when we hugged, and I feel it like he’s here. And each time I say, “thank you” in my head. In other cultures his appearance might be considered a spirit. In ours, I might be prescribed more medication.
I’ve been thinking of all this as I’ve been on the periphery of too many people dealing with loss over the past few months. Beth’s sister Bobbie died a couple months ago—Bobbie and her husband Harry hosted our wedding in their backyard. Then last week, Bobbie’s daughter Lynne died — meaning Lynne’s daughters lost their beloved grandmother and mother in rapid succession. Beth lost a sister, and then, a niece.
Too many friends have lost parents and other loved ones over the past few months. And we lost Anna Perlberg, one of Beth’s students, just a couple weeks ago.
In Anna’s case and in Beth’s sister Bobbie’s case, they left gifts. Bobby left a diary. Anna left memoirs she wrote as a student in Beth’s class, and a whole, wonderful book, called The House in Prague.
The stories people leave are transcendent. They’re funny sometimes, but not always happy. Sometimes they’re heartbreaking. They remind us that people are flawed and wonderful and remarkably resilient. They provide a window on the authors, a window that their survivors can open any time they want to get a whiff of their lost loved one.
Which is all to say, get the old-timers in your life to tell their stories. As a callow kid I found the details of my parents lives tedious. I’d give anything to hear them today.
It can be writing 500 words at a time via Beth’s Writing Out Loud method. But it can be as simple as sitting down and recording conversations or taking notes. Or going to StoryCorps.
And think about telling your own stories for those you leave behind, too.
With that, I leave you with a poem by an ancient Jewish philosopher named Yehuda Halevi. When I listened to it on an episode of Fresh Air last week, it reminded me there is no inoculation against grief, and there is no cure for it either. But maybe that’s the way it should be.
‘Tis a fearful thing to love what death can touch – a fearful thing to love, to hope, to dream,
To be – to be and, oh, to lose – a thing for fools, this, and a holy thing – a holy thing to love,
For your life has lived in me. Your laugh once lifted me. Your word was a gift to me.
To remember this brings painful joy. ‘Tis a human thing, love – a holy thing to love what death has touched.
Writers in my classes who are downsizing into smaller apartments or senior living centers come to class musing about all the stuff they’ve accumulated over the years. What do they leave behind, I wonder. How do they decide?
I also wonder what writing assignment I might give to prompt them to answer those questions. Wonder no more! Sheila, a writer in my Wednesday class, emailed me a while back with a list of prompts she wanted me to assign. If you’re blind, can something still catch your eye? Maybe not. So, one of Sheila’s prompts catches my ear: “Write about Something in Your Closet.”
I like to use prompts that are vague and open to all sorts of possibilities, and this one would work in three different instances:
I assigned the prompt to all my December classes, and 97-year-old Wanda responded instantly. “Any of you remember the George Carlin skit called Stuff?” she laughed. “We all need a place for our stuff!”
I told writers who were uninspired by the prompt to go home, open a closet door and take a look. Pat did exactly that, opening her essay the next week describing herself standing in front of the closet in her entry hall and hesitating. “My closet is such a nag! If I open the four imposing bi-fold doors a big red neon light is going to start flashing, ‘To Do…To Do.’”
Carol hoped to avoid the nags from the closet in her condominium by hiring a residential professional organizing service to help her downsize. She moved to a smaller apartment six weeks ago, and the organizer was there to help her unpack as well. “Once again, with my daughter assisting, she was a whirlwind.” Dozens of boxes disappeared in nothing flat, she said. Dishes and pots and pans were all stacked in the right cupboards. The organizer also managed to cram everything from the large wardrobe containers into the only clothes closet in Carol’s new apartment. “Summer clothes are mixed with winter ones, longer items on one side, shorter things on the other…everything that I kept has to be somewhere in there, but where?” she asks. “What’s in my closet? I wish I knew!”
Mary moved recently, too, and wrote of how the closet in her new place haunts her at night now. ” I can almost hear my closet crying – it is so empty!” she wrote, explaining what had gone on once they’d decided to move. “I saw beloved old 78 records from my college years fly off into oblivion, years of Nativity scenes collected from all over the world escape back into other houses, stacks of papers disappear into shredding machines, and sets of dishes and silver and table linens vanish out the door.” Mary described the contents of her new lonely closet as “the belongings I have saved from the moving van, the charitable resale stores, the electronics recycling center, the backyard trash bin, the book dealers, my new best friend Phil at UPS, the far flung homes of our children, and the on-line auction clutches of Everything But the House.”
Bob and his wife Linda are still in the condo they’ve lived in for years, and he opened his essay with a decree. “There should be a marriage law that all closets should be divided equally between husband and wife,” he wrote. “Why is it that my wife’s closet is more than two-and-a-half times bigger than mine? Linda has clothes for all seasons, and if you ask her, she’ll tell you there are at least seven or eight seasons in Chicago.” Linda’s closet floors are covered with shoes, but he can count the things on his tiny closet floor in one hand: tool kit, box of hair styling equipment, shoe shine stand and a small stool where he sits to put on his shoes and socks.
That is, until Linda got a new office chair and made plans to take her old overstuffed heavy desk chair to their summer place in Indiana. “But in the meantime, where do you think her old chair is sitting?” he chuckled as he read out loud in class. “Well, it’s sitting right in front of the little stool I used to sit on to put on my shoes and socks.”
As for Sheila, the writer who’d suggested the prompt? She wrote about a uniform from her working days. “I’ve kept my Air Canada ticket agent uniform in the back of my closet FOR 34 YEARS,” she wrote. “I’m proud of my airline career. It was my identity.” Perhaps she can carve out a new identity now as the student who provides writing prompts for her memoir teacher. This was a good one!
Please. Make it stop!
I hate coupons.
I hate loyalty programs—whether it’s frequent flier programs or little punch cards that you have to carry around so you get that 10th cup of coffee free. I hate cash back schemes, mileage cards, hotel points. I hate all of it.
I know some people enjoy clipping every coupon, taking advantage of every buy-one-get-one free deal—it’s kind of a game for them.
It all just aggravates me. Save the money it costs to run the freaking program. Cut the price for everybody. Shut up and quit trying to manipulate me.
But I’m not immune to it. When it comes to flying, we’re enrolled. We’re in the Kimpton Hotel Karma rewards program. I get emails from loyalty programs I can’t even remember—they date from work travel in bygone days.
Even when we have a lot of points, enough to do something free, I hate them. Go online. See how much it costs in dollars. See how much it costs in rewards points. If we fly on this day and that time, yes, we have enough points. But really, it’s not that expensive: maybe we should just pay dollars and save the points? Then there’s a fee to use the damn points. Headache builds.
Same thing with hotels. Hours on the freaking computer figuring it out. I’m absolutely sure that if we all put some small value on our time that we’d discover tracking down these deals is a net loss.
This little fit of mine was triggered by a bar stool conversation the other night with some of our old bar stool pals from the now defunct Hackney’s. We were at another neighborhood haunt called the South Loop Club—it ’s an old, old school joint with Formica tables and Formica bartop. It’s clean, but nothing’s been updated for decades—except it has the ubiquitous flat screens with sporting events running all the time. But. it’s quiet. WXRT—an FM music station that’s an institution in Chicago—plays at a low volume in the background, and conversation happens without yelling.
Anyway, Hackney’s isn’t the only local institution to have closed in the past year. Blackie’s, another bar/restaurant—one that had been in the hood forever—closed its doors a few months ago. When it did, we also lost a great place for weekend breakfast. There are lots of other places around here, but they’re all overcrowded, loud, trendy and expensive. (Have I said, “Get off my lawn!” yet?)
The friends we were with Saturday night are part of a neighborhood group that breakfasted at Blackie’s religiously every Saturday morning. A really terrific, comforting ritual.
The group auditioned a bunch of breakfast replacement joints, and happily, they have found another old-school place—a little farther away than Blackie’s—that has somehow survived a wave of gentrification. It’s called Eppel’s.
Anyway, our friends Kyle and Cathrine talked about the breakfast they’d had that morning. They liked the food and the folks that worked there. And they have apparently established themselves as regulars, because, they said, on the way out, everyone in the party was handed a cup of coffee in a to-go cup. “It’s on us,” said the manager.
Now that’s a loyalty program.