Stop and smell the roses

I went for a walk today with a friend in the Thornden Park Rose Garden.  I am not a gardener, I don't have a green thumb.  But, walking under the flowered arches was achingly beautiful.  My friend was fascinated by the identifying markers for each rose bush.  He puzzled over the names, the dates, the description of the type--multiflora, tea, climbing...Walking the paths was like walking a labyrinth.  Bill's dementia forced us to focus only on what was immediately in front of us, every turn brought a new gasp of delight as if we were seeing each plant for the first time.  Each time a name was read we wondered about its origin.  Fourth of July?  Did the rose look like the red and white of the flag or fireworks exploding in the night sky?  Headliner?     Was that a show off rose?  Gold Medal?  A beautiful yellow.  The sky was a perfect blue background for the colors.  The breeze made sure we were surrounded by scent. Sometimes remembering isn't needed. Sometimes just being present is all you need to do.

    

The gift of siblings

Family picture day, 1965. My mother wanted to have a "nice" portrait of her adorable children. We did not cooperate.

I recently read an editorial about the value of siblings and the special role they play in our lives. The author, Frank Bruni, notes how siblings are with us through the whole arc of our lives.  They know us the longest of anyone, especially as we age and experience the deaths of our parents. Siblings are there for the childhood games of midnight tag in the summer, stagecoach on the bunkbeds, and ice skating on frozen ponds. They are there for the awkward teenage years when we are too fat or too thin, our hair too frizzy or too straight, our friends too close or too distant.  Siblings are there for our marriages and divorces, our children's births and toddler years, our teenagers' misadventures.  They are there to comfort us at the loss of our grandparents and parents. 

Siblings are part of inside jokes about things like persimmon pudding and incompetent camping that nobody else will ever quite understand. They are the people who can make us laugh until we cry, who with just a word or gesture can have us convulsing on the floor.

The role of siblings has been a long neglected area of social research, I think.  There is much to be learned about the role siblings play as role models, as caregivers, as counselors. 

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/26/opinion/sunday/bruni-the-gift-of-siblings.html?smid=pl-share

That's okay...

Today I was at a workshop on journaling. I've kept a journal for years, but am interested in new ways of approaching my writing. What I came away with instead were three phrases:

Give yourself permission.
It's okay.
It's the process, not the product.


A friend shared this poem with me recently:

Things to Think

Think in ways you've never thought before
If the phone rings, think of it as carrying a message
Larger than anything you've ever heard,
Vaster than a hundred lines of Yeats.

Think that someone may bring a bear to your door,
Maybe wounded and deranged; or think that a moose
Has risen out of the lake, and he's carrying on his antlers
A child of your own whom you've never seen.

When someone knocks on the door, think that he's about
To give you something large: tell you you're forgiven,
Or that it's not necessary to work all the time, or that it's
Been decided that if you lie down no one will die.

-Robert Bly

I found the last lines to really hit home...maybe later I can tie all of this together....

Plants I have loved...

           

Not long ago I heard an interview with Rabbi Zalman, a sort of hippie Jewish-Buddhist guy big in death and dying circles. The Rabbi was talking about forgiveness and mentioned that often when he gives lectures on forgiveness he is asked, “What about Hitler? How can we forgive him?”  He laughed and said, "Why does everyone want to start with the big guy? Why not start small?"  And he gave examples of how we forgive small infractions often throughout the day. Start there, he argued, and work your way up. He went on to mention the message of another person (whose name I’ve forgotten) who wrote on learning to love with a similar point.  When we say we want to learn how to love, we often are talking about loving a different person with a different gender.  How can we expect to start there?  Again, he laughed, and said, "Why not start small?  Start with a plant.  Learn to love a plant first."

My grandmother was a gardener and her house and yard were filled with plants and flowers. I am not of that bent, but one of the very first things I purchased when I moved into my new apartment last summer was an African violet.  My grandmother and mother always had several and it seemed like the right plant to occupy the windowsill by my breakfast table (which is also my lunch and dinner table). When I served my stint in the dean’s office, someone mentioned that my office seemed sterile and needed a plant. I went out and bought a cyclamen with variegated leaves and pink flowers.  It bloomed for a while, and moved with me from office to office. But, when I made the last move to Lyman Hall I decided to bring it home.  It recently has started to bloom again and has joined my violet on the windowsill.  At Christmas, my friend was concerned that I wouldn’t have a tree and gave me a very small potted Norfolk pine adorned with her daughter's popsicle stick ornaments.  It still sits on my coffee table and is growing nicely with its glitter snowflakes and Santa hat decoration, oblivious to the changing seasons.

But, those stories may give an erroneous impression of my ability to love a plant.  There were several planters sent to my mother’s funeral and afterward we divided them amongst ourselves. I wanted to keep those plants as a reminder of my mother. I wanted to be able to point to them years later and say fondly, “That plant came from my mother’s funeral.”  My planter had a perilous journey back to New York, having to be overnight shipped after I left it in a hotel room on the way home.  Over time the plants faded, the cats chewed them, I lost track of which were which as they were repotted.  Now, they are gone.

 

I suppose I wasn’t good at loving in that case.  But, now I have a chance to start over with my African violet, pink cyclamen, and Norfolk pine…..

Do good work...

I heard something today that helped me put some things into perspective. I was at a workshop on "aging well." The topics were focused on how to make the second half of life more meaningful.  I wished for it to be better than it was....but, there were a few nuggets I'll share.

The first was a sentence in a section about facing mortality.  The speaker focused on the things we might want to communicate to others about how we want to die, the things we might want to do before we die, and the things we fear about death.  On one slide she had a list of several things we could accomplish before our deaths.  One of them was "Do good work towards letting go of resentments."  She went through the list quickly, not spending much time on any one item, but those words stood out "do good work."

I sometimes struggle with the somewhat contradictory admonishments to not be so hard on myself and to face up to my flaws.  I seem to vacillate between extremes, be harder on myself, be gentler on myself...what is the right balance?  Thinking about it in terms of "doing good work" helps a bit.  I can't expect perfection, can't expect I'll always get it right, but I can expect myself to "do good work."  It reflects a balance between thinking nothing is my fault and everything is my fault.

A good day to be a mom

Yesterday was "flight day" in the Carrier Dome where the senior aerospace engineers fly the model planes they designed as their senior projects.  Although there had been tense moments in the past week, my son and his team performed beautifully. Their plane flew well.  But, to watch the excitement of these 25 kids was the best part of the day.  The whole group was a bundle of nerves and the sense of relief and accomplishment afterward was palpable. You felt proud of all of them.  I can wish many things about my son; that he had a job already, that he had gotten better grades, that he had done some things differently, but to watch his face yesterday was a true gift.  I'm so glad that he has enjoyed college, made good friends, persevered through the challenges, and was able to have this experience. I know he will always remember it and I will, too.

Last year I supervised our sociology department's senior thesis projects. Working with a dozen young women, I got to see up close the joy and sense of accomplishment they felt as they presented their finished work to the department. The night before, as they emailed me their presentations, I could sense their nervousness.
Here are some of their messages, filled with exclamations and emoticons...

"Attached is the final draft of my thesis presentation!!!!!! See you bright and early :)"

"Here is my PPT. I have attached it as a PPT file and a PDF because I figured it is easy enough to attach both!
Thanks for all the help. I hope my presentation is worthy!"

"I have deleted the lit review slides. While I think these are of utmost importance, they just made my presentation so long! Sorry for the inconvenience! Taking them out allowed me to more thoroughly go through my own research though :)  See you in the morning!"

Like my son and his peers, they performed beautifully.  It was a day I know they will remember and I do, too.

Professional Friends

I've been in Ann Arbor for a few days at a meeting with my professional friends. It was a good place for me to be right now. They care about me, respect me, and want what is best for me, in my professional and personal life. They make me feel valued, they seek me out, they listen to me.  Over the course of 2 days our conversations moved nimbly from survey design and measurement to spirituality and family.  

A few weeks ago I was in New Orleans at our population association professional meetings and attended a 50 year anniversary reception for the Penn Population Studies Center. I was able to spend time with my grad school mentors and friends and felt the same way, I belong. I am continually struck by the different types of friends I have and the varied roles they all play in my life.  

I wonder if those kind of friendships develop in other types of occupations, like accountants or assembly line workers.  Certainly one of the nice things about academic life is that you can have contact with the same group of people for years.  These are the people who have seen me "grow up."  I think there is something to be said for these kind of relationships, they are a nice complement to more intimate, personal friends.