Inspiration – Page 3 – Mary's Room With a View

Living inTwo Time Zones

A late September afternoon, I am walking home through Volunteer Park, past the playground, quiet as expectation now that children are back to school. Swings, slides, and sculptures for climbing stand silent midst a leaf-spotted lawn that borders Seattle’s historic Lakeview Cemetery. A chain link fence separates a high swinging child and rows of manicured tombstones, many erected in homage to the settlers who first populated our city with Gold Rush, timber-eager adventurers. Pausing before a limp swing lit with early autumn light, I am back seventeen years, lifting my toddler grandson into the swing, then swooshing the boy and swing for a high cemetery view. When both of us are ready to proceed to the slide, my grandson tells me, “I know, Nana, how all those people died.”

“How?” I ask, accustomed to his surprising perceptions.

“All those big stones fell on them.”

Well into my grandson’s nineteenth year, I have retold that story to my grandson and the entire family, so it is a chapter in our book of family humor and nostalgia. However, this morning, the passive swing not only reminds me of the funny story. I actually feel his three-year-old self is forever in that swing. Were he to ask, “Nana, push me,” I would not be surprised.

Here in my seventh decade, many of my waking moments exist in multiple time zones. It is a multi-tasking of the mind. I am here at my computer typing away at this blog, while I am simultaneously surrounded by humming electric typewriters in my high school keyboard class, learning to use ten fingers to travel between adjacent keys. I am in that 16-year-old body.

Is living in multiple time zones common? If so, is it more common with older people? This capability to exist mentally in various places at once, is it unique to humans? Is it the same thing as memory? Of course, memory is essential. Don’t tell me animals live only in the present with no vital memories. When it is time for us to go to our cottage, and we take out the cooler from the basement, our cats disappear. They know the cooler means travel, equals kitty carriers, equals confinement. We must put them in their carrier before even thinking of fetching the cooler. Yet remembering and simultaneous existence are not the same.

The brain has many rooms to visit, and with age, I find the doors are often left open. For about five years, every month I visited Florence Cotton, a long-time member of our church whose age and infirmities prevented her from attending services. In her 100^th year, she acquiesced to moving into an assisted living home. Because I asked how she liked her new residence, she told me that there were many programs there she wanted to attend; however, she often missed them for falling asleep in her chair. A woman who always sought the bright side of disappointments, Florence went on, “But it isn’t all bad. Even though I sleep many more hours now, in my sleep I visit friends and family I had forgotten I knew. They show up just the way I knew them at a certain time of my life.” She savored her time travel.

Simultaneous existence can also be painful. My friend Molly tells me about the day she got up to go to school and found no breakfast waiting, but her mother crying. Her beloved brother died in a car accident while young Molly slept. Decades later, remembering the day with another brother, she said they both began to cry, feeling again their loss as if for the first time.

For me, time has never been linear. It circles around itself like a whirlpool in a pond, gathering newly dropped leaves as it turns. We are brought back around as we proceed forward. Have you heard the declaration, “I don’t want to go there?” I have. The sentence suggests a benefit to burying the past. Understood, as a way to avoid adversity, but today I am thinking that having lived through so many experiences with so many people, I am in a position to live in two or more places at once, and thus able to be more empathic with others who may be experiencing something for the first time.

H.G. Wells, and other futuristic writers, embrace time travel. It isn’t a space ship experience where we go to the moon and beyond. Time travel is a ferris wheel circling in the amusement park of life.

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High Tide and Low Tide

Our cottage sits on a tidal bay, a thumb, if you imagine Dabob Bay as an open hand, one of many large bays on Hood Canal. Thirty years ago we looked every summer for a low-bank waterfront property we could afford, and curiously settled for a tiny cottage on Quilcene Bay where there is water in front of us for only half of the day. Summers, when the sun warms the tidal flats to swimming temperatures, we are “tied” to the tide book. No matter what tasks we are doing, we stop to run through the open gate and plunge in for a swim, push out in a kayak. or balance on a paddle board as soon as a chart in that book registers eight feet or more. Winters, the high tides can exceed 13 feet, and when married to high winds, the sea trespasses, often knocking out the gate with a floating log, white caps swamping our lawn.

Before purchasing this waterfront property, I lived blissfully unaware of the moon and the tides. I didn’t think about highs and lows, not to mention high low tides and low high tides, abbreviated by locals as High Lows and Low Highs. This morning my husband looked through the window as the tide seemed to inhale from the shoreline, revealing mud flats gleaming in the early morning sun, with intricate patterns of streams that ribbon across the shining silt. These streams are the terminus of two rivers and an old creek, all delivering salmon fry in the spring and welcoming returning fish in the fall.

“I love the low tide, as much as the high tide,” he said, reaching for the binoculars to spot heron tiptoeing between the streams and the violet green swallows checking out the boxes he has raised on poles along the shore.

More of a swimmer than bird watcher, I am happiest when the tide is in, but I have memories of my grandchildren flailing joyfully in the warm mud, emerging like faceless sea creatures to be vigorously hosed off before permitted inside the cottage. I too have ventured out on the flats where my feet sink, then my knees, until I fall helplessly in the sucking mud, leaving no option but laughter.

Before inhabiting our tidal bay cottage, I did not imagine the allegorical truths inspired by connecting with those fluctuating tides. In the past thirty years, by connecting to what the tides are communicating, I am discovering revelations of life itself.

Near dusk a few years ago, my brother and I shared a canoe we had paddled a few miles south of the cottage. As the sun continued to set, we turned to paddle back home. Sitting in the bow, I lengthened my stroke while I visited with my brother. He paddled deeper and harder from his seat in the stern.

“How do you think we are doing?” he asked.

Proud of my stroke, I answered, “We should be home soon.”

“Look to the shore,” he said, indicating the oyster company where the lights had just turned on. I looked. I paddled. I looked again, and I paddled. The oyster company lights remained fixed in place. The tide was retreating so fast, that if we didn’t double our efforts, we would make less distance forward than backward. The strength of the tide, accompanied by an expanded vision, remind me that all effort may be relative to some fixed reality. Changing tides inspire humility, helping me to accept what gifts I didn’t know were coming. Just as high winter tides carry a battering ram of a tree trunk to wipe out our driftwood fence, so the water retreats, dumping our fence and stairs at the end of the bay. Neighbors help us retrieve what is ours, and in our scavenging, we find even better planks for restoration. Low tides uncover oysters and clams: a table-is-set ebbing of culinary fame. Even baby crabs scramble along the shore. In late August, salmon return along the streams that lace the flats. Salmon battle determinedly up those streams between lines of families fishing for a big one to take home for dinner. The tides give and take away, like the hand of a natural god.

How do I answer the ubiquitous question, “How are you today?” Ninety percent of the time, I answer, “I am fine, or I am well.” Perhaps, it has been a good day, or I may venture to say a “bad day,” – if the one asking is a friend whom I can trust will hang around for sorry details. Certainly, our days are never all good nor bad. I like to think the condition of my days parallels the tides. If it is a Low – Low, I may forget that there ever were welcoming waves in front of our cottage. If it is a high tide day, I know I am riding a surface on a paddle board, head-high enjoying the sunset sink behind Mt. Townsend. Most days are those Low Highs or High Lows, but nothing is stagnant. All life is movement. We know the moon will turn from crescent to full, and the bay that emptied all but bubbling craters where clams breathe, will within hours, cover meandering streams with salt and sea.

HOPE

“Hope” is the thing with feathers –

That perches in the soul –

And sings the tune without the words –

And never stops – at all

And sweetest – in the Gale – is heard –

And sore must be the storm –

That could abash the little Bird

That kept so many warm –

I’ve heard it in the chillest land –

And on the strangest Sea –

Yet – never – in Extremity,

It asked a crumb – of me.

Emily Dickinson

Hope is the first green-gold bud of spring on winter’s leafless limbs. To have a word for hope is a miraculous thing, for how else could we express the force that inspires us to move forward in times of despair? Some linguists argue that without a word for an emotion, you can’t express, maybe not even feel the emotion. I disagree, but I understand the clarity that comes with being able to say, “I hope…”

Hope is not expectation, the latter assuming some planning and reasonable certainty. For example, we wait to plant lettuces until the last frost has passed so we may, according to the seed package, expectabundant produce in 58 days. Hope ,on the other hand, takes over as a word of the imagination, so we plant in April’s cool earth, regardless of knowing there could be more frosts, even snow or ice. Nevertheless, I press the seeds, little flecks, into the cool, damp soil while I imagine June’s salad.

Because it is a word of the imagination, hope reaches for the poet’s tools – simile and metaphor. Emily Dickinson writes “Hope is a thing with feathers that perches in the soul.” We see, in our mind’s eye, not an amorphous soul, but a small, fragile bird chirping in anticipation of attracting a mate, a bird so fragile it would be easy prey for my cat. Emily’s hope is one pounce away from extinction. Nonetheless, her poem moves to gratitude that hope comforts without expecting anything from her. True, it has none of the planning and preparation of expectation, but hope is not fragile. It holds us in our own sturdy hands above the grave.

When does Dickinson hear the hopeful bird song? She hears it in the gale or on the chillest land or the strangest sea. We are most aware of hope when our lives face challenge. It faces off against another strong emotion, despair. Hope was the flag that preceded the march of youth from Marjory Douglas Stoneman High School to the steps of their nation’s capital. Students did not march to scream their despair, like King Lear howling to the heavens. They marched to speak their young hope for a violence-free nation, and it is that hope that sings in the gale. Hope looks forward, not backward. Barack_Obama_Hope_poster Barack Obama based his drive to the presidency not on a slogan to “Make America Great Again”, but on hope. The Barack Obama “Hope” poster is an image of President Barak Obama. The image, designed by artist Shepard Fairey, was widely described as iconic.

It is President Obama’s version of hopethat connects with me in my seventy-fifth year. Words shift meanings when you enter the last couple decades of your life. My hopes are no longer so personal, though I may hope I don’t die of some long-drawn-out disease. I do know I will die, a knowledge I could shove aside in those years when my mirror didn’t offer me wrinkled skin and thinning hair. My hopes now are less personal and more universal. Having 75 years to look backwards, I have the courage to imagine 75 years forward in my absence. At a recent Seattle Arts and Lectures event, the host asked guest author Barbara Kingsolver where she found hope in today’s divided world. She replied that hope is a kind of energy she chooses to renew each day. To abandon hope, she would be abandoning her children, her grandchildren and the children of the world. Each day, as readily as pulling on her socks, she renews the energy of hope. I too renew hope in the storm for my grandchildren, for my planet. I may no longer imagine the June salad on my own dinner plate, but I can hope for food on the tables of a world where climate change has been acknowledged and ameliorated, where peoples around the world share the bounty of what each contributes.

April is almost here. I drive through the Suquamish Reservation to Hood Canal. The highway dips between stands of evergreens spaced by deciduous trees now wearing a yellow green hue, those fist buds on spare limbs, limbs that last week were winter stripped. The windshield wipers click rhythmically to clear steady rain. Like a chant, I hear the punctuated consonance of hope, hope, hope.

WHAT IS METAPHOR FOR?

Tell all the truth but tell it slant—

Success in Circuit lies –

Emily Dickinson

With metaphor, you know precisely what something is by explaining — if not exactly — then almost. You pinpoint a treasure by standing nearby. Long before Google, even before Johnson’s Dictionary, or the first written word, metaphorical thinking expanded the human world. I like to think of my cave sister explaining sex to her daughter when she ventures out to accept an invitation to mate. “Mating? It is like taking a long hike through unfamiliar woods with a person who will exhale his being into your being, like the wind that comes into our cave when we roll away the stone.” That may be a far-fetched example, but how else can a mother communicate the leaving home, then the joining of man and woman without using a comparison to something known? Such is the excitement of metaphor. It doesn’t travel alone into the unknown. It always has one foot in what we know so that we can extend the other foot into the unknown.

Metaphor is particularly useful for understanding abstractions, like TRUTH. Poets use metaphor for exactly that purpose. How do we communicate grief? It is both personal and universal. Archibald MacLeish writes in Ars Poetica, “For all the history of grief / An empty doorway and a maple leaf.” What profound absence he expresses in one metaphorical image, so that my heart hollows out with sadness as I picture that open doorway beyond which there is absence. In defining grief, a dictionary would settle for “deep, sadness, often lasting a long time.” The dictionary is accurate enough but cannot replicate the feeling of grief defined in MacLeish’s open door or the falling maple leaf.

My piano teacher explained to me how I should properly begin the music by Liszt that I was learning. He instructed me to first put my foot on the pedal, then slowly lift my hands to the keys — first the right, as the opening note is in the treble clef, then the left, joining it for the first chord.

“Think,” he said, “that you are giving a gift to the audience. Do you want to simply hand out the gift, or do you want to wrap it with a bow, then offer it? A polished performance is a beautifully wrapped gift.” Now as I play that first measure, I envision the notes, but I also see an exquisitely wrapped package. Without the metaphor, I might have played the measure correctly, but not with the same commitment his package metaphor describes.

In my church community, we regularly discuss how literally or metaphorically we read the Bible. Many Americans have left religion altogether because the Bible remains the cornerstone of churches, and in an empirical age, people will not subscribe to a belief in miracles such as virginal birth. Others, in some fundamentalist churches, turn off the reality button, permitting their literalism to deny what science disproves. The Bible itself abounds in contradictions, making “the word of God” as evasive as mercury spilled from a broken thermometer. For me, literal readings can make the Bible as shallow as a puddle in which we look no deeper than the reflection of our own face. Metaphorical readings expand in lakes and oceans, often feeding channels between islands no one mapped. Christ does not have to resurrect in the flesh, offering his wounds to Thomas or anyone else in doubt. Christ can “come again,” among his followers who, despairing his death, realize his teachings never left them, but will endure. Christ had risen!

For those of us who love to read and to write, metaphor is an engaging friend. I recently finished reading Michelle Obama’s memoir, Becoming. I will never be the First Lady of the United States and cannot possibly experience living in the White House for eight years when every move the family takes necessitates hovering protection from secret service agents. Even the windows of the White House are so thick that a helicopter landing on the roof cannot be heard from a top floor room. These are facts about Ms. Obama’s life there, but it was her metaphorical descriptions of her life from the South Side of Chicago to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue that helped me to feel what she felt. Metaphor opens the envelope for empathy. What a wonderful organ our brain is that we can look at the moon while Alfred Noyes describes “the moon is a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas,” and we can see a full sail sailing ship in rough seas and at the same time a real moon, flitting in a tumultuous dance among clouds.

What Can I Do?

Holiday parties bring together long-time friends who don’t keep in touch on a regular basis, so conversations often begin with inquiries about what engages us these days. Telling my friend Lynn that I had started a blog featuring thoughts as a septuagenarian, she suggested I write one on retirement. Lynn complains that her husband, who recently “retired” after 40 plus years teaching high school art and coaching soccer, has retired his regular paycheck but not his person. Soon after packing up his classroom, he volunteered to show up for any little jobs around school. He can fix anything, no payment required. There he returns many a weekday morning, in his green VW bug, its odometer brimming with commuter miles.

I sympathize with both Lynn and her husband. When I retired from teaching high school over twenty years ago, my identity felt as unstable as a leaf clinging to an autumnal oak. My daughter consoled me with her version of an old saying: “You can take my mom out of the classroom, but you can’t take the classroom out of my mom.” I would continue to behave and to think of myself as a teacher. In “retirement,” I became the nanny as well as Nana, to my grandchildren, reading them books, instructing them on names of mushrooms on our walks to the park, and later pressing their chubby palms in to dough as we kneaded loaves of bread.

While working in the pay-day world, we fantasize about retirement, especially when our backbones ache for sitting through late-day faculty meetings, or our Sunday afternoons disappear under stacks of essays in need of grading. I had two fantasies: one was to wait tables so I could still enjoy the company of others, even serve them a pleasant dining experience, but not wake up in the middle of the night revising a lesson plan to better suit a challenged student. The other fantasy was to drive a big truck, sitting high behind the wheel watching the landscapes exchange their variable beauty from one state to another. There would be no student hovering by my side to complain about a grade — the cacophony of high school pep assemblies replaced by soft jazz from the truck radio. This fantasy focused me so completely that one morning I almost missed my freeway exit to school when I saw the sign: North to Vancouver, B.C.

No doubt, restaurant servers and truck drivers would educate me on these naïve perceptions of their jobs. My husband reminds me that driving the truck is only part of the job. I would have to be strong enough to unload it upon arrival. Fantasies serve to get us away without getting away. Once retirement comes, we have finally escaped those parts of our jobs we didn’t enjoy. Yet clinging to those displeasures like a demanding child, are those tasks that actually fulfilled us. In teaching, fulfillment might be that very clinging child whose progress depended on our support. From serving others, our work and ourselves gain importance. I confess that upon leaving Woodinville High School, I couldn’t imagine how seniors unable to take my college prep English class would ever survive in college. (Time here for laughter)

Retirees miss not only their jobs but the routine that employment offers. Sure, my friend’s husband is still driving back to his old school. I walked to and from the University of Washington my final years teaching on campus. I walked down the hill each morning, stopping for a latte and scone on the way. At the coffee shop, Jackson, a garrulous Scottish baker, swapped stories with me as I bit into one of her jam-filled scones she pronounced as “Skhanz.” On the way home, I took the opposite bridge across Lake Washington’s ship canal and back up Capitol Hill. Seasons blessed my exercise with meditation on falling chestnuts and blooming early plums. In retirement, I missed that walk, though I could still walk down and around the university whenever I wished. But without a purpose? Years passed until I began offering to walk my daughter’s golden retriever down the hill and through campus, where the dog’s “I love people” expressions and wagging tail attract undergrads who miss their dogs left at home. Now the walk resumes with “purpose. ”

Routines plug us into the circadian rhythms of a day. My husband’s friend who this year accepted “forced” retirement for those over 70, is depressed. “I don’t know where to go mornings,” he said, with the grief of loss. Something needs to call us, and now it is time to listen for new voices. With time, they may speak from within.

Each Labor Day I feel called to buy notebooks and new shoes. I have not returned to a classroom of my own; however, I have volunteered for after-school homework help at the library and a couple of years tutoring in a ninth-grade classroom at Garfield High. In 2004, a poetry box I affixed to the fence surrounding our home offers a routine of selecting and printing a poem I copy each month. I email the monthly poem to those not close-by to take a poem from the box. On telling those folks this is my 15^th year with the poetry box, my husband’s niece wrote, “We appreciate the lessons and places you’ve taken us with your 15-year commitment to the Poetry Box. Roger and I would likely never discuss poetry without the Poetry Box so thank you for this gift!”

The recent government shutdown leaves many feeling helpless. Many complain, “But what can I do?” That sentiment is akin to the helplessness experienced with retirement. Our years after the routine of salaried employment may offer time to put usefulness in perspective. For me, often a poem rises from memory. John Milton, who felt his career as a writer was his service to God, lamented how his blindness curtailed his writing. From his sorrow came Sonnet 19, that concludes:

“God doth not need

Either man’s work or his own gifts; who best

Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best. His state

Is Kingly. Thousands at his bidding speed

And post o’er Land and Ocean without rest:

They also serve who only stand and wait.”

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TRADITION

We do something on a regular basis and call it habitual. But when does Habit become Tradition? Tradition is an aggrandizement of Habit that brings people together. When my daughter was eight years old, she asked that I bake for her birthday the same cake her friend Katherine’s mother made for her. Winnie Sperry, known for her famous Mother Sperry’s Plum Pudding, made a birthday cake that requires four hours to finish. Even so, this year as my daughter turned 49 years old, I made that cake again. Once during her 14^th year, I thought I would save time by making from scratch only the frosting, then using a yellow cake mix instead of the 5 eggs, 3-times-sifted, everything-at-room temperature recipe Winnie used. My daughter, clearly disappointed, complained, “Mom, how could you? That cake is our Tradition!” All it has taken over a lifetime with our daughter is for her to announce something is Traditional, and it might as well be etched in stone with gold-leafed letters.

December, including Christmas and Hanukkah, is weighted with traditions. We can easily trace traditions from lighting Menorahs or evergreen trees to Black Friday sales following Thanksgiving. Yes, some traditions have more luster than others. And we cannot judge Traditions by reason as much as a by familiarity. Today, some may be frosting cookies to set on a plate by the fireplace for when Santa descends. The custom may continue each year, long after the children have left for college. Many families either follow established traditions or stumble on to their own, without realizing a little habit or ritual grows like a child whose appetite wants feeding.

For many Traditions, a new one may hang like a leaf on the branch of an established one. Take Christmas cards. In the early lean years of our marriage, we decided to join the card tradition by making our own. My husband graduated with an MFA in printmaking, and the heavy steel presses lined up waiting to be used in his basement studio. Influenced by the etchings of Rembrandt, Allan drew an elysian image of a descending angel, etched it in a metal plate, and ran twenty-five original prints for those to whom we wanted to send our Christmas greeting. We made no commitment to ourselves or to others that there would be another the following year.

Over forty years later, this week we are sending out four hundred original prints. As the recipient list lengthened, my husband moved to silk screened prints. He completes a watercolor painting of his image. Then he cuts a stencil on a film for each separate color. There are several pigments. Next, he runs each color on every card, layering the stencils as he goes, and hanging each to dry between colors. In the early years, as he pulled each color, I would run the card to a drying rack. We were still under a hundred cards then. Recipients collected them, made special Christmas books for their coffee tables with a new page for each year’s card, framed the cards and hung them in their homes. Every time I climb the stairs from the first to the third floor of my friend Loui’s home, I follow the framed cards she has hung in increments along the stairwell. It is like climbing our history. Inevitably, we needed to trust the reproducing work to a professional with a large studio. Allan still creates the image and cuts the stencils before passing on the stencils to Tori, our third professional printmaker.

In the twelfth year, as I admired Allan’s watercolor of ducks on a frozen bay, I told him, “This one reminds me of a winter solstice poem I wrote.”

“Why don’t you copy it and include it with the card?” he suggested. Shyly, I included Winter Solstice on Quilcene Bay. Our friends liked getting a poem with the print, and so . . . fifteen years later, my poem, Thin Spaces, accompanies this year’s print.

More than a repetitive practice, Traditions can be the creative force in a marriage. I don’t know when Allan first thinks of next year’s image, though he starts on the watercolor between October and November, getting it to the printmaker to allow her a few weeks’ work. I wait to see the watercolor, sit with it for a bit, and let it take me where it will. I never ask him what he intended. I don’t tell him what inspiration ignites me. Here we are separate creative entities. It may not be apparent why this poem and this image would be in the same envelope; however we ride this Tradition on different horses set out for the same horizon.

As much as making that birthday cake for my daughter, our Christmas card, like any tradition, requires time. In addition to old friends and relatives, our list includes my Bible Study group, Allan’s basketball buddies, our neighbors to whose mailboxes we hand-deliver the cards on Christmas Eve. Then there is the Washington Athletic Club group. What started as a small gathering of early-morning athletes celebrating a Holiday Season breakfast, grew to sixty strong. Gordy dresses as Santa. After handing out our cards, Allan describes the artistic process, and acknowledges the fellowship of starting each day with a workout among friends. I read the poem aloud. Each year, we wonder if maybe we should forego the task of contacting catering, renting a room, taking sign-ups in the locker rooms. But each year, club members ask, “What is the date of this year’s breakfast? We love that tradition.” Suspending a “Tradition” can feel like desertion.

Within a weekend or two after Thanksgiving, my husband and I turn up Christmas music and sit down at the dining room table, one across from the other, while we address, write notes, and slip those cards and poems into envelopes for mailing. As tired as we are with that long sit, we are also remembering each recipient, sometimes sadly erasing the names of those deceased. We smile when a friend’s name takes us back to those early years when not having a lot of money to buy Christmas cards, we started a new Tradition and made our own.

Thin Spaces

The space is thin

where heaven and earth meet,

shallow as an ebbing tide.

Thin is winter wakening

beneath diaphanous snow

on hills seen through leafless limbs

of an oak planted in hopeful spring.

Thin is that hovering hush

before the raven calls,

a cry we know will come

with the returning tide.

The year divides itself in half,

speaking in a space without words.

Mary Kollar

December, 2018

GIRL TALK

Having paid for my coffee and scone, I seek a favorite corner table at the Volunteer Park Café. It is one of two tables by a front window with a view to the orange leaves of a sweet gum tree and a sidewalk café table under its autumnal branches. It is 7:00 AM on an October morning, the first rainy day of many to follow, so the café lights hold us warmly inside, and with the darkness outside, I cannot see the tree I usually enjoy. At the table beside me, sits a woman in her 30’s, checking her I-Phone until she looks up to welcome another woman, perhaps a decade older, her hair graying in a stylish bob. The newcomer hangs her rain jacket on the chair, slips her umbrella under the table, and the two of them begin talking before she sits down. Although I am close enough to eavesdrop, I don’t intrude, and besides, I can infer by their exchange, the way they lean in to their shared space — gesturing and taking turns as they speak –that they are helping each other through some little thing.

“That is what friends do,” I think, “especially women friends.” They tell stories about what happened, and to confirm the friend has listened sympathetically, the other tells a similar story. Two stories are better than one. One of the stories echoes the veracity of the other. Are women naturally narrators, or do we tell stories on ourselves to confirm those told by our friends? Is it a kind of “group think?”

Later in the morning I meet with a woman I have known for twenty-five years. She asks to meet with me to discuss a sadness in her life for which she believes I might have a shared experience. We have family and friends in common, and they are the subject of her grief. First, we catch up on little things we do to fill our days. Then, testing a shared comfort, she begins to tell her personal story of a loss she experienced years before we met. She pauses. Because I know the Girl Talk script, I sense she is waiting for me to tell of my own loss years before we met. From our stories, there might not arise exact similarities, but there will be a kind of universality of experience that brings understanding to a sad occurrence. People seek reasons for their pain, but will settle for parallels, if reasons can’t be found.

Perhaps others around us might think we are gossiping. It is sad that even in Shakespeare’s plays, women are portrayed as Gossips. The word Gossip itself, when used as a noun instead of a verb, implies a woman, usually an old woman. So much literature and art tells or shows women in confidences sharing those stories, usually about others in the community. Gossiping suggests the stories are negative. Rather than telling a story to arrive at some truth, the Gossip tells stories to denigrate another or elevate herself by juxtaposition. “Did you hear that Maggie Jones spent $500 dollars of her husband’s social security check on new shoes?” 62f4f28099400943d273b309608c5eb5 Gossiping is inherently judgmental, and I regret that it is more often associated with women. But men gossip too. They tell about a business rival who cheats on his income tax. Men’s Sports Gossip (sometimes referred to as “Locker Room Talk”) can be as rough as the sports they discuss.

Another common perception of Girl Talk, is that women talk more than men. That seems situational. When with their own gender, women may speak rapidly. There is a delight, like a bubbling fountain, when two female friends discuss the best way to do something they both love, such as reading fiction, or when they are sharing complaints from work or home. When in mixed company, I find women speak less frequently, or turn away from men, to carry on a separate conversation with other women present. It wasn’t that long ago when after formal dinners, women were escorted to the parlor for music or knitting so that men could converse civilly in their absence. The male talk was to be more serious and consequential than what concerned the women in the parlor. Certainly, the masculine talk was more consequential, because white men held all the power. Why share it with the powerless?

When women talk, they are expected to keep their voices soft, at least softer than men are permitted to speak. If women speak loudly or aggressively, they are called “shrill.” I have never heard a man’s talk referred to as shrill. At best, angry. Women are not expected to express anger. It somehow lessens the power of their message. Recently our daughter suggested we watch Nanette: Comedy Hour on Netflix. MV5BY2I3MThmYTctZTU4YS00YWNmLTg4YzktNDY0ZGE5MmQ3Y2Q3XkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyMTMxODk2OTU@._V1_UY268_CR4,0,182,268_AL_ The stand-up comedian, Hannah Gadsby from Tasmania, based her humor on the awkward lives of lesbian women. A lesbian herself, she told about her own experiences suffering criticism and misunderstanding. As the show continued, what was at first humorous, became tragic. Annoyance grew to righteous indignation. What she said was no longer funny. The show was, however, profound. My husband didn’t enjoy the show, because of Hannah’s expressed anger, even though he sympathized with her many grievances. If she had spoken softly and slowly, her voice not pitched in indignation, I wonder if he would have more readily accepted the truths she offered.

Women and narrative are one. The process is not quantitative. Years ago, when the UW physics department bemoaned the lack of women enrolled in their classes, they researched the differing ways men and women learn, hoping to find an answer there. They did. Women are more than twice likely to learn something through a story than are men. Facts alone won’t stick. Women are more attracted to a subject embedded in narrative.

There is no more dramatic illustration of the power of Girl Talk than the #MeToo Movement. The conversations do not stop with “Me Too, I too was harassed or raped.” The talk continues, “And this is what happened, and this is who did it, and this is what I want now.” The stories pour out from abused women, not merely for retribution or even for justice, though both are needed. The stories are also for healing. Carrying unspoken stories is like dragging around a stuffed suitcase of clothes so old and worn you wouldn’t be seen in them in public. Telling the stories, one old coat after another is cast away, leaving the abused woman weightless, ready to wear a new story that fits comfortably, perhaps helping her feel attractive for the first time. images

“So get to the point,” my husband said yesterday while I was telling him a story about my day. We were driving in heavy traffic, late to meet friends for dinner. He was trying to concentrate, while I was talking in my circular way about my day. But when he said, “So get to the point,” I wanted to protest. For me, it wasn’t the point that mattered, but the process of telling the story. Some of my stories intertwine with others, so I cannot just slide down them like a rope that ends in a coil of understanding. The unfolding of the story is as important as the point, if there is a point at all. There need not be one, or there may be many. In the process of telling, I may find a point I didn’t know the story possessed. Meanwhile, let me tell it. Let me tell it my way.

Don’t cut me out of the story. In my parents’ life, there had been a series of infidelities by my father when he was in India in WW II. All my life, I intuited my mother’s distance and lack of intimacy with him when he returned to the States. I stumbled across photos of unfamiliar women in a jeep in Delhi, another, a woman sitting on an army truck, her legs crossed so her skirt rode high on her thighs. My mother did not remove those photos from the album. Only in the year before she died, when I took my now-widowed mother for a weekend on the Oregon coast, did she tell me some of the story, of her loneliness back in Iowa with three children, of letters my father sent suggesting their marriage might end when he returned. They did not divorce, by the way, although I think my mother’s life may have been better had they separated. Because she finally told me the story behind those photos, my heart was less heavy than it had been throughout my childhood. I was in no better place to repair her life, but her story with that history, helped me experience our mutual love. grandmahainerbirds 2 . And there you are — all stories are love stories, because through them we bond as we walk along the tangled paths of our human condition.

Why Run?

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Other than listening to folks describe their medical procedures one of the least favorite topics is the athletic endeavor. That said, when over seventy-years-old, I am running – rather, jogging—along East Quilcene Bay and up the cedar lined hills, the kilometers demand an examination of why I am doing this and why I feel so good.

Last Sunday, we awoke to steady rain, and would have crawled back under the quilt, but we had volunteered to man the water station at the 5-mile mark of the annual Quilcene Half-Marathon Oyster Run. By the time we dressed, the skies began to clear, so I asked my husband to man the water station alone, and I went to the starting line at the Linger Longer Stage where I signed up to run the 10k race. I don’t think I have run more than 6 miles in 2-mile increments, since 2016, when I ran the half marathon (another last minute decision) . This Sunday, I turn on I-Tunes on my phone at the start of the 10K. It will take only two complete replays of Pink Martini’s “Get Happy” album to keep me company until the finish line.

The scenery alone will keep me running. Morning shadows lengthen, stretching across the dampened road so the tree shadows appear even longer than their height, and I am running from one to the other. After a kilometer up Center Road, the course dips down past a farm, its green barn open like a mouth to exhale its hay-fresh breath. Sunflowers shine from the garden, September heavy with produce. Behind the garden, ochre grasses cover the tidal flat intersected by Donovan Creek. The salmon will soon work their way up that creek, and though I can’t see them from the road, their perseverance energizes me. After the farm, McGInnis Road ends at East Quilcene Road, that hugs the bay like a necklace around wavelets of white, because the wind that brought that daybreak rain still billows from south to north. Its force reminds me that I am a slender woman who with a big gust could be blown off the road to topple on to the grassy fields. I pass ancient apple trees, their trunks bent in testament to the wind, fallen apples fragrant with fermentation.

Then the road turns to a slight rise by the Sunday Egg Stand a girl from a nearby farm built to sell eggs and flowers. White dahlias smile from the stand by the egg cooler. I begin the slow ascent south that will take me by the field where Racer the horse used to run to greet me for a fistful of grass. Gone now, his spirit keeps me running. Soon I approach the water stand outside our own drift-wood fence where my husband sets out paper cups of orange and lime Gatorade on a small table. I grab, gulp and go on. I know the hill rises steeply for another eighth of a mile, the open view from the top, showing the bay is at high tide, the longer autumn shadows splitting the sun on the water’s surface. Blackberries thrive on that hill top, berries now dried and fragrant as old wine. Turn-around for the 10K comes in a dip in the road, darkened on both sides by Palmers’ woods, old as the peninsula itself in giant Doug Firs and Big Leaf Maple trees. If I were not mid-race, their deep woods would invite me in. But here is turn-around, monitored by Linda and Stan Herzog. Linda calls my name. Stan snaps a photo.

And that is another reason to run — the people. Two years ago, when I ran more often, I would do this 10K stretch alone. Some days it felt demanding, lonely and masochistic. Running in a community is exhilarating. Back at the start line I stood among families who would walk the 5-K, some with toddlers in strollers pushed along like envoys on a mission. Kids in t-shirts and jeans, twenty-year-olds in fashionable running tights that show off the ripple of taut muscles, people my age wearing rain or sun hats tied securely under sagging chins. Then there are the thin men in short shorts. They are lithe and slim hipped. Have they never stopped running? Some might be 25, some 65, but the way they stretch out their hamstrings, you know this will not be their only race of the year. Around us white tents cover food stands staffed by volunteers. Unknown This is an oyster run, celebrating Quilcene’s famous oysters, so the aroma of wood coals and garlic bread already permeates the air. Depending on where you stand, it is fried food or local ale to keep a mind motivated for returning to this spot after the race. Everyone is happy. Those who know me, cheer me on. They seem more confident than I that I will make it the whole way. I will make new friends as the race begins, when I discover whose pace falls in with mine. That is how I meet Michele and Meg. We don’t talk much during the run. All of us are tuned in to whatever music lifts one foot in front of the other, but there are moments of encouragement among us. Good going. Feel free to pass. Yes, the hills are tough for me too. I pass a woman with her arm around her young son, a stalky boy who clearly has some cognitive impairment. He smiles widely at me.

“You brought out the sun for us,” I tell him.

He laughs. My voice and his voice fill the same space on the road. That connecting moment energizes me all the way up the hill.

The sheriff at the bottom of the road directs me to keep to the right until I am at the police cars where I can safely cross over to the finish field. She applauds me as I run. Her green shirt has an oyster image: Sheriff Volunteer it reads.

And finally, the physical part. I want to remember when the endorphins kick in after the 2^nd kilometer. I am running downhill by the green apple tree where yesterday I stole enough for a pie. I look up to Mt. Walker ahead and my chest fills with autumn-washed air. Breath is wonderful. Deep, deep breath is exhilarating. I could run forever on this feeling. I could spread my arms and mimic the gulls and ravens swooping over the bay. I start to write this essay in my head so no feeling will fail to remain.

Farther into the run, my legs get heavier. I need to remind myself that I pronate on my right foot. I might trip over my foot if I don’t consciously lift it. Remembering coaching from my friend, Jan, I extend my legs, more forward, less up and down. My face flushes in the sun, so I scold myself for forgetting sunglasses and sunscreen. I have long ago left the cool morning start, so I toss my rain jacket to my husband when I pass his water table. Sweat alternately warms and cools me. When the finish line is in sight, I imagine myself lying in the park grass. I imagine how good it will feel to pull my knees to my chest and hug my shins. When I do arrive at the finish, I stride out as I had not for the entire run. Here I am about to cross under the finish balloon, people on each side applauding, the announcer calling my name and town. The friends I know who are standing behind tables loaded with water, fruit, oysters and beer, smile at my success, but show no amazement that I did it. Only after one takes my picture, do I realize my face is raspberry red. I sit by another runner on the grass while our bodies cool. The sun is full out, but I am beginning to chill. My newly acquainted runner drives me back to my cottage where I peel off my running pants and shirt. My tongue tastes salt. My skin feels like salt. I realize I have excreted a good amount of salt water. As soon as I persuade myself to leave the hot tub jets, I will drink a tall glass of water. Every part of my body has been used: my feet, my legs, even my shoulders and neck. I should feel beat up, but I don’t. I feel twenty years younger. Maybe I will get back into this running thing.

The best way to feel like a big fish is to select a small pond. There were 40 runners who ran or walked the 10K. There was one 81-year-old walker, but I was by far the oldest runner at 75. I finished smack dab in the middle at #20 with 13 minute miles. I am proud enough of my over-seventy pace, my over-seventy race.

Fast Cars and Fast Women

“Do you want to read the draft of my new blog post?” I ask my husband before his first sip of morning coffee.

“What’s it about?”

“Preparing for loss.”

He rolls his eyes, (his reluctant “Ok”) revealing he has no interest, but will acquiesce for marital harmony.

He twists the espresso arm in place. “Why don’t you write about fast cars and fast women?”

He doesn’t have to say that “loss” is depressing, and why would anyone want to read about something depressing?

My gut rejects “fast women.” After all, it is MY blog, where I would have no inclination to write about a guy’s interpretation of what makes a woman “fast.” I inform him that I named my blog domain thouightsafterseventy.com. People over seventy think about loss and death and stuff. He need not remind me that he too is over seventy, but he would rather think about fast cars and fast women.

I am feisty enough to take his suggestion as a gauntlet thrown down. I decide to write about “fast cars and fast women” for those of us over seventy.

And none too soon. Driving back to Seattle later that morning, we spot a sleek, futuristic car speeding past us on I-5. Its silver lines are like a heron in flight. Sharp and angular, the chassis is mostly sculpted metal for aerodynamics, with only a small bubble for driver and passenger. As it speeds by our 1997 Toyota, I note a New York State license plate.

“What kind of car is that?” I ask my husband

“A McLaren,” he tells me. “Very rare. Super expensive.”

“Not much room for passengers.” I am critiquing it as if anyone might find the car useful.

“Probably some young, rich, techy guy with money to burn,” he says.

The lane that holds the sexy McLaren slows, so we are now side by side. We strain our necks to spot the fast, rich dude.

The driver has blonde hair, falling to her shoulders, an attractive woman about thirty years old, her chin raised confidently to see over the steering wheel.

“Fast car. Fast woman.” I tease my husband.

If once we sought out fast cars and fast women, do our tastes change substantially fifty years out from our youth? Clearly my husband maintains his interest in cars. Two of his most cherished: a stock 1951 Chevy truck and a rebuilt 1938 Ford Club Cabriolet. We keep both automobiles at our Hood Canal cottage, driving them only on sunny days, a rarity except for summer months. He also pauses the T.V. remote on the car auction sites when channel surfing for a program we might both enjoy. As for fast women, I can’t say. I snagged him pretty early on, and he was a shy guy who found me interesting enough to ask me to a movie.

As I pass from one year after seventy to another, I often tell friends that no matter how old I am, I am always 16 inside. When I was sixteen I was a string bean, 100 pounds, in a time when Marilyn Monroe’s curves graced gas station calendars. My brother joked I was so skinny that if I stood sideways in class I would be marked absent. Nonetheless, I wanted to be a fast woman. I struck up friendships with girls who looked like Veronica in the Archie comic books. original-grid-image-10351-1487214506-7 Marsha, for example, had that same silky black hair that cascaded in a rakish wave over her left eye. She rolled her shoulder length hair in wide curlers that she slept on all night. I did the same, waking in the morning, my cheeks branded with curler rounds, having slept fitfully on the plastic rings that were held in place by stiff internal brushes. I also learned how to smoke, tapping out a Pall Mall Thins from Marsha’s pack that she kept in her plastic purse. Those were the sacrifices needed to be a fast woman. I could only dream that the good-looking guys would look at me the way they looked at Marsha.

Sometime between our twenties and where we have landed, we give up pursuing those adolescent fantasies, but I don’t think fantasies disappear. When I was forty and in the second year of psychotherapy, Dr. Phillips asked me about my fantasies. That was after bemoaning conflicts with my teenage daughter and emotional distance from my husband. I was teaching high school full time, and feeling a failure as wife and mother. Every minute of my life filled with Must Do’s.

“Well, I do have one,” I told my good doctor. He encouraged me on. “I am sitting by a slow-moving river on a warm spring day. I have spread out a picnic cloth on which there is a glass, a bottle of good French wine, a loaf of French bread, a wedge of brie, and a great novel. I have all day to stay there if I want.”

“That’s it?” he asked, stifling a yawn. “You know some people fantasize about sex or even murder. Even doing away with their defiant children”

I shrieked in opposition.

“There is no right nor wrong to having fantasies,” he explained. “It is acting on them that gets people in trouble.”

Now we are in the midst of the #METOO movement where hundreds of women are stepping forward to indict men who tried to actualize their fantasies. If wisdom comes with maturity, here might be the lesson. Hold tight to your fantasies. but keep your zipper zipped.

It is good that finally there is a public platform to expose eons of sexual abuse against women. Men are becoming more sensitive about what they say or do around women so their friendliness is not misinterpreted. I wonder how caution affects their fantasies. We are all sexual beings, even if the libido takes a nap after sixty. I cringed when my husband suggested I write about “fast cars and fast women,” for I considered his words most inappropriate for this #METOO time, but I appreciate his freedom to express his fantasies. MV5BMjg4MmZiYTAtYzRkNy00OWE2LTlmMWItZGFkZmQzM2VkMDJhXkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyODc1NDEwNzQ@._V1_UX99_CR0,0,99,99_AL_ Besides, the night before, we stayed up late to watch an old Paul Newman movie, The Young Philadelphians. I can never get enough of Paul Newman with his shirt off. It has been years since I relinquished any fantasy that Paul would leave Joanne Woodward for me. Today I cherish my husband’s stride with a noticeable limp from his basketball years, while I still remember the muscles in his thighs when he leapt for his famous hook shot.

Rehearsing Loss

A flowering vine blooms along East Quilcene Road. Its lavender blossoms are bubbles, like sweet peas, so I have called them wild sweet peas, until my neighbor recently shocked me, identifying the vine as vetch. Walking up the road Sunday afternoon, I saw a long, flowering vetch vine winding itself like a garland around a young pine tree. The vine used the tree as a support for its growth, an attractive decoration.

I had been thinking on my solitary walk, about a recent email from a friend in Connecticut. She wrote how she is supporting a friend who recently lost her husband. Her friend’s loss made her fear how she herself would continue on, were her lover of over forty years to die. Because they have never lived together, she might not know he had died, only that he would no longer call. Where would she find support to proceed with her life without him?

As I continued up the hill that hugs the shoreline of Quilcene Bay, I practiced what I would say to her. It occurred to me that her imagination and her email to me were like rehearsals for inevitable loss. I could reply, “Live in the present.” But no one completely lives in the fleeting moment. We prepare for our futures from the time we realize there will be a tomorrow. After seventy, the tomorrow holds loss. When the Seattle Times Obituary column starts to look like our high school annual, the future looms, and it is not one where we are preparing for college.

Here is how we prepare. We call our lawyers and make wills. As we walk through our homes, we look with critical eyes at the stuff we have collected over the years: paintings and pottery, furniture willed from our own parents – settees and rockers we have not used in recent memory. Thinking kindly of the ones who will have to deal with it all someday, we may begin to give things away. My own mother taped our names on the bottoms of silver tea services. Somehow this disposition of accumulated stuff is not the most important loss for which we must prepare. The most frightening for some of us may be to lose a life-partner, a likely reality. In my mind, I imagine living alone. “ I lived as a single woman the first thirty years of my life — I can do it again,” I console myself, knowing that I will not be the same young single woman. With this practice in mind, envisioning my single self, I walk on to the crest of the hill and watch the easy, returning tide on the bay.

What we do not rehearse are the out-of-order losses, such as the death of a child. Last week, a friend whose daughter died of cancer this year, shared with our church group some experiences she found comforting. People have been coming to her to tell her things about her daughter she had not known. They tell her stories about her daughter’s teaching, and how it had made a difference in the life of their own child. Another had a funny story in which her daughter played a humorous role. Instead of maintaining what they might assume would be respectful silence about the lost one, these people comforted the mother by bringing her lost daughter to life in a new way. It is almost as if the stories rejuvenated both mother and daughter. As her daughter succumbed to cancer, my friend may have struggled to imagine how her own life would continue without her daughter’s presence, a very short time to practice loss. Now that she walks through the loss, she accepts surprising and unimagined support from others.

Will the loss of material things help prepare us for the loss of life? Recently I lost a gold chain necklace somewhere on the cobblestones of Rome. It was my favorite jewelry that I wore almost daily and perhaps had not secured properly. I was in Rome with my granddaughter. Greta and I had our own cozy VRBO apartment and had just settled in for our first night to adjust to jet lag, when I realized my necklace was no longer around my neck. We both scoured the apartment to no avail. I did not want to dampen the holiday by laying my grief on my granddaughter. I made light of it all until she had fallen asleep. Then I texted my husband back in Seattle, wailing in cyberspace about the loss, how I had loved that necklace he had given me for an anniversary gift. I may even have asked his forgiveness for being so careless in fixing the clasp. His response? “Is that all, Mary? Look now, you still have Greta.” There he was again, my support in an unimagined way.

Just as the lavender vetch intuited the supporting tree, so we too may find a way to continue growth through the grieving season. A life teaching and writing poetry supports me, for there is rarely an experience that does not call up a poem that holds me. Here is a villanelle by Elizabeth Bishop.

One Art

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;

so many things seem filled with the intent

to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster

of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.

The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:

places, and names, and where it was you meant

to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or

next-to-last, of three loved houses went.

The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,

some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.

I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture

I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident

the art of losing’s not too hard to master

though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

Elizabeth Bishop