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

OPINION OR OPINIONATED?

My husband startled me once at dinner with another couple, where we were discussing marital contentment. He said, “I married Mary for her opinions.” He meant it humorously, because before his statement, I was freely offering opinions about the upcoming elections. After his publicly parting the curtain from my prominent practice, I have pondered whether I am opinionated, or a woman who offers opinions. Connotations matter. We don’t discount people who have opinions, but we don’t like “opinionated” people. Opinionated people leap like an eager dog on visitors without being sensitive to others’ willingness to be accosted. Do I want to abandon sharing opinions, or do I want to avoid being opinionated?

Opinion or Opinionated may seem an unlikely subject for a blog Thoughts After Seventy; however, what shapes our opinions and how vigorously we voice them fluctuate with time. Thus, here I am, at seventy-five, weighing in on when I should open my mouth and when I should keep it muzzled, fully aware that the opinions of older folks get readily dismissed as old fashioned. Whoever made the connection between old age and wisdom?

My friend Kristin recently forwarded a quotation from a prominent philosopher that one should only offer opinions when one can argue the opposing viewpoint with equal vigor. I admire the sentiment, but not all opinions have opposing views. Nonetheless, if I cannot or will not study an opposing view, I can be sensitive to a listener’s perspective.

images

Last summer, I was discussing with a close friend the eulogies given by G.W. Bush and Barak Obama at the memorial service for Senator McCain. I opined that both presidents were eloquently presidential, to my surprise, for during Bush’s administration I found his speeches bland. Bush’s eulogy was as eloquent as Barak Obama’s. My friend had not heard the speeches, and may have had other opinions associated with Obama, so she expressed her disdain for him whom she accused of speaking only at exclusive events sponsored by wealthy people, and then exacting lucrative fees from which he was living a “high life” in Washington D.C.; whereas, he had once determined to live in Chicago following his presidency.

images-1 I jumped to Obama’s defense. “Are you aware?” I asked my friend, “that you regularly disparage people who have money, although you are quite wealthy by any standards?” My words reduced her to tears. I felt as if I had wounded my sister.

Clearly both of us had strayed from the initial opinion of the eloquence of the two eulogies.But could I have phrased my Obama defense in a kinder way, rather than take her to task for comparison of wealth? Could I have let her express her opinion without countering? I want to learn to express opinions without attacking the person giving the opinion.

As to seeking the opposing point of view, once I tried to level the playing field of my political opinions by watching an hour of Fox News to collect information that may have passed under my blue radar. I hoped at the least to discern motives that might lead the Fox commentator to a political podium opposite my own – a kind of empathy strategy. I failed. Before the commentator completed the segment, I was tallying up my points for attack. Some of that tallying closed my mind to what was coming up next. It is the timeworn, self-inflicted wound that curtails following an argument. So much for empathy. Impartiality is really hard. photo (1)

Timing and frequency of opinions deserve some thought. My friend Judy says her mother claims that Judy was born with her hand raised. What an appropriate image for her, a respected and outspoken 1^st amendment attorney. I have the similar urge to raise my hand at every opportunity. But it is not true for everyone. What about those who refrain from offering opinions? Do they have none? Take Tuesday Morning Bible study, for example. Among the 30 people who regularly attend, only seven or eight of us regularly contribute to the discussion. Some silent members comment after the meeting how much they enjoyed the discussion. I want to challenge them: “How can you enjoy an experience where you took no active part?”Yes, but I also envy one who is intelligently observant without participating.

A favorite student from my honors senior English class comes to mind. Elizabeth sat in the first row of the class. Whenever I led a class discussion on literature, she raised her hand to answer almost anything I asked. I often ignored her, hoping others would join the discussion for the first time. After class one day, when only she and I were in the room, I told her I hoped she wasn’t offended when I overlooked her raised hand.

“That’s okay, Mrs. Kollar” she said, “I can’t NOT raise my hand.” Her voice held a note of apology as if she wished she could be one of the confidently voiceless, but popular students who couldn’t or wouldn’t risk their posture of being too cool for class discussion. I may not always have called on Elizabeth, but what joy I heard in her voice when I acknowledged her hand, and she shared her opinion.

Do Americans more freely offer opinions than people from other countries? If so, perhaps there is a link to the way we teach our students. When teaching high school English, I may have started the class with “What happened” questions just to review the plot of our current book, but I soon moved on to the Why questions, those asking for opinions, granted opinions backed up by the text. We call it critical thinking, and American schools pride themselves in educating not only willful students but also ones who think critically.

Our media backs up the practice. Even televised football games wave the American flag for opinion. The game itself is supposed to last an hour, but after eliminating commercial time, a viewer still endures at least an hour of pre-, mid-, and post-game time where commentators toss around opinions. So many balls in the air at one time. Then back to Fox News, or CNN, or any other show touting itself as a news source. Good luck at finding anything approaching factual news. A body lies on the pavement, a VW in the ditch, but the commentator is rushing around with a microphone asking twenty people what they THINK happened.

How challenging to validate opinions for the expertise of the one giving it. Clearly the most authentic holder of opinions must be “They,” for so often we hear “they say” before every opinion from upcoming elections to the weather report.

Are opinions poisoning our water? Should we refrain from forming, expressing, or critiquing opinion? Would doing so make us more affable? Cutting opinion from newspapers might save a forest without lighting a match to our brain. Besides, who wants a quiet brain? Our determination to think, to share, to shape what we experience will not lie down like an exhausted hound. Today, that’s my opinion.

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.

What Remains Hallowed on Halloween

Nostalgia is the Achilles Heel of septuagenarians. Discussing anything, but especially holidays, people expect you to start out, “Well in my day ….” True, some of us start every sentence that way, even without expectations. Nonetheless, nostalgia has its literary value, so let’s talk about Halloween, in my former days and today. What endures in this one-day celebration of gluttony and horror?

I think it was back in the 60’s when some misanthrope put a razor blade in an apple meant for trick or treaters. The media spread the story, and almost overnight folks handing out treats for Halloween abandoned homemade delicacies for foil-wrapped, all-the-same versions of mass market chocolate. How many Snicker Bars or Peanut Butter cups does one child need? Does any child remember what house gives out Milk Duds and which Nestles Crunch? Little distinction, even less distinction in flavor or freshness. Super markets shove bags of Halloween candy on their shelves in late August.

As a child in an Appalachian college town (1950’s), I was rarely lucky enough to be given a candy bar. There were no mini-wrapped versions, so if someone were to give out candy bars, it would be a whole Hershey’s that could set the host back a nickel each. Instead, mothers baked cookies the week prior to Halloween. Cookie cutters shaped the shortbread dough into pumpkins, ghosts and witches. Orange frosting added authenticity. Mrs. Cooper, the wife of the Geology Dept. chair, made caramel popcorn confections the size of little cannon balls. She wrapped each in waxed paper, the tops twisted and tied with orange curling ribbon. They were my favorites. New neighbors, the Theopolis family, lived in a brick house down a side road yet to be paved in the new housing development. I wonder now who clued them in about the Treat or Treat custom. Someone did, for when we walked tremulously down the unlit drive, Mrs. Theopolis greeted us with true Greek hospitality. In each held-out hand, she placed a baklava, warm and dripping with honey, a clove stuck in the top like a fragrant toothpick. We thanked her, then ran gleefully down her driveway to where the ornamental persimmon trees grew. Unknown Below them we dumped the unfamiliar, and therefore suspect, sopping honey confection. My adult self longs to return to the front door to be given a second chance. From many houses we got apples, always apples, barely welcomed in our greed for sweets. Mom separated them out from our Trick or Treat bag, parsing them out for school lunches. She also saved the nickels given by those unprepared to bake. Once there was a quarter among the change.

As for costumes, we never ordered anything more than a simple mask from a department store. Costumes were important, very important, our chance to try on a fantasized identity. But costumes had to be assembled. First stop was the linen closet, where we pawed through old sheets, feeling which were thread-bare so Mom would let us cut ghost eyes, or drape ourselves like Roman senators who would return home, our togas dripping inches of Virginia’s red clay that would never wash out. My mother encouraged me toward girlie costumes, to dress me as a princess or Snow White. Yet having two older brothers, I wanted nothing less than finally to get to dress like a boy. No Dale Evans for me, when I could be Roy Rogers. 121498191-1024x1024 I borrowed my brother’s leather cowboy vest, redolent with his own sweat that I identified with horse flesh. His cap gun hung heavily from my non-existent hips. If I were lucky, he would share a red roll of caps, their explosive pops filling my lungs with sweet sulfur.

Bunching in cadres of siblings and friends, little ghosts, goblins, and a few witches with broken brooms, swarmed across vacant lots and between new homes set in spindly landscaping. The screams of banshees drifted over the dewberry fields: wait for me . . . Mama said you have to …you’re too slow … I told you that gun was too heavy for you … let’s not go there … let’s do . . . I will if you will. Groups of other kids ran in and out of sight. In spite of their disguises we guessed who they were, meeting up under one or two street lamps that offered the only light other than the moon. Like thieves, we exchanged our targets thus far: the best places to hit up — who gave more generously — who already turned off their porch lights. Each year, there was the thrill of unknowing in a custom as familiar as home.

Halloween 2018 feels more packaged. The 30 to 40 children who climb up our front steps are costumed in child-sized versions of super heroes. The costumes are purchased, so one Ninja looks identical to the one a few minutes earlier. CIMG3768 It is only an occasional child, usually a young one, who has changed identity for the night, who growls like the furry beast it is. I long for role-playing, for the ferocious tiger who will dare me to open the door wider. I hold out the wide wooden bowl brimming with mini Snickers and Tootsie Pops. Each year the packages shrink, but the kids don’t seem to notice. Their plastic pumpkin carriers are brimming with replicas of what we are giving. Over their shoulders, the little monsters thank us as they race back down the stairs to the sidewalk where an adult or two waits to escort them to the next house. As they secure their children’s sticky hands, does their tongue remember the taste of their own childhood? Gone are the days when children ran out the front door as soon as dusk swallowed the maple trees, to tag along with older siblings, combing the darkening streets until the soiled pillow case, filled with treats, weighed them down. Then it was time to return home to parents, unconcerned about absence after dark, sitting by a lamp reading until their costumed children had played out their one-night characters and were ready for sweetened sleep.

_DSC1108

Why Run?

race55433-customSectionAttachment5ab423dc5b2b27.37780431

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

Interdependence Day

Interdependence Day

Ashes settle on Quilcene Bay, acrid gunpowder seeping through the bedroom screens where our two cats huddle in terror under the bed: Independence Day. Few people call July 4^th “Independence Day,” preferring. “The Fourth of July,” a fiery celebration, rather than a recognition of a significant event in our nation’s birth. It has become the night when all are free and independent to explode whatever they have purchased, usually at discount stands in a nearby Native American reservation, (irony intended). It appears that Independence has morphed into “my privilege to declare my freedom with explosives.”

Could we take the notion of Independence back to the birth of the nation? From whom did the colonists want to be independent? The despotic King of England. Did the colonists want to cut off trade in tobacco and tea? Of course not. The colonists were dependent on trade. Was the revolution waged as an Independent battle? That is, did Massachusetts ever think of going it alone? Not in a thumping heartbeat. The colonies depended on each other to keep the stars overhead of one as well as the other, until they wove a common galaxy in the new United States flag.

I love the evolution of language, — how “nice” in Shakespeare’s time meant silly, and now connotes kindness. So, what about Independence in 2018 America? The current president is off to Make America Great again. In his mind, that means Independent of commitments to stand side-by-side with countries that have lain their young on battlefields years before we acknowledged that Germany or Japan may be dominating the planet. Have we ever acknowledged our dependence on England or France? Rather, our country has cast ourselves as the great liberators, the Independent nation on whom the rest of the Free World depends.

For many, Independence has come to suggest self-sufficiency. How many men (yes, it is more of a male thing) have boasted that they “pulled themselves up by their own bootstraps?” My love for figures of speech intrigues me to imagine some dude leaning over his cowboy boots and tugging on those side-leather extensions until he becomes entirely erect, feet shoved into the narrow toes, head shoved high into a ten-gallon hat. Under that hat he has not imagined the person who made the boots, or even the parents who, at the very least, fed him for his early years, and likely purchased the first boots for his tiny toes. No sir, he did “it” all alone, whatever “it” is.

It is time to assure our pets they are safe to come out. It is time to trade in Independence Day for Interdependence Day, a time to celebrate how one gift, one gesture of kindness, fulfills another person’s life. The farm-bountiful Chimacum Valley is a testament to Interdependence. Soil rich, green pastures are watched over by the snow-topped Olympic Mountains. That valley could have gone the way of flat valleys East of Hood Canal and become a shopping mall. However, the Jefferson County citizens hailed their interdependence with agriculture. The Jefferson County Land Trust, supported by nature-loving citizens, funded small organic farms.

In an abandoned shed at the crossroads between the town of Chimacum and those farms, citizens chanced a country farm stand, a place where farmers could sell their produce, where citizens could buy fresh food, where young people could find jobs in an employment-depressed community. For eight years, the farm stand has expanded: fresh eggs, vegetables, plants, ice cream, pastries and bread. The founders loved the gifted farmers of the area and wanted them to make a good living. They cared about the youth who needed jobs. They valued a local economy. A “local economy” is not the same as an “isolated” economy. To celebrate success, the farm stand owners decided that the week after the 4^th of July, they would declare an Interdependence Day. Over eight years, the celebration grew too large for the farm stand and its pebbled parking lot. The party moved over the intersection to Finn River Farm and Cidery, today, a million dollar business that started because one farm family and the Land Trust figured out a way to acquire land for orchards, and farm buildings for cider tastings and casual dining adjacent to fields along the salmon-running Chimacum creek — where families could toss horseshoes, or play shuffleboard, while local musicians tune up their fiddles in what once was a feeding trough for pigs.

2018 Chimacum Interdependence Day Poster 2

Last Saturday, Allan and I sat at a round table we shared with new friends. We drank cider, ate pizza and watched parents and children line up for the talent show. Sitting under the late afternoon sun, families and friends applauded as each child stretched to the microphone with a ukulele, harmonica or their own sweet voice. The audience whistled and clapped. Children need that applause because they are growing. They are growing, not by themselves, but with the love and support of that community on which so much depends.

While my musical nostalgia embraces Frank Sinatra, it is pleasing to imagine Old Blue Eyes stepping up to the Interdependence Day microphone to belt out, not ”My Way,” but “Our Way.” Interdependence Day — a day of music, good food, and connections with others who love life — not to be better than any other community, not to be proudly separate, but to be comforted in our connectedness.

Vulnerable While Mating

From the second week in October through the end of January, wildfowl, flying above or riding the wavelets on Quilcene Bay, survive in the grace that falls between shotgun shells. Mallards, pintail, buffleheads, and Canadian geese, known for pairing for life. Looking to the horizon above the tawny shore grasses and beneath the green and purple foothills of the Olympics, I try hopelessly to count the individuals in a flock, their migrations so wide and long, undulating like a flag in the winter wind. There are hundreds, although plentitude cannot heal the stab in my heart with each blast that brings one down to the fetching dogs. In my empathy, each fallen bird may as well be Icarus. The loss cuts more cruelly in my gut when a goose falls, its life-long mate honking rage in the smoking gunfire. For over thirty-years I have watched the flocks, as large one year as the year before. I marvel that they return to the killing fields. But they do. Are they that foolish, or are they aware the odds are on their side as they are hundreds strong against a handful of hunters, hovering before dawn in a chilled swampland?

Hold your breath between the end of hunting season and spring. Where are the garrisons of courageous birds? In Seattle, they are walking down the center of the Burke Gilman bike trail, not a body of water in sight. Mallards waddle in courting pairs, as dodging cyclists swerve around them, without a single duck pulling in a pin feather to avoid a crushing death. Oblivious. Completely oblivious, not only to cyclists, but to camera-toting pedestrians. I walk as close as I want to photograph a pair, their muffled quacks indicating more annoyance than fear. And what comes to mind, is not the under-fire ordeal they may have experienced over a duck hunting winter, but how vulnerable they are when mating.

Vulnerable when mating. How true for us all. I will not be too anthropomorphic about this. Surely the ducks are following natural urges to reproduce; theirs is not human love. Yet note how the drake puffs his breast, putting himself between the hen and the bicycle, as if to protect his lover. Human love is just as vulnerable, with or without reproductive urges.

Spring is the season of love. As we leave the shelter of our winter homes, walking out into the first days when the temperature exceeds sixty degrees, we look both ways crossing the street. Do we look both ways when approached by a potential lover? My twenty-something friend writes to me about her true love visiting from Ireland for a few weeks. She has longed to see him, but casually mentions he wants to date other women as well as being with her. I want to scream out “Look both ways! A truck is barreling down the road and its brakes don’t work.” I say nothing.

Our mailbox usually holds a couple of 42138510-greeting-card-with-roses-watercolor-can-be-used-as-invitation-card-for-wedding-birthday-and-other-ho wedding invitations for the month of June. We buy a gift, attend the wedding and listen to one more couple swear “’till death do us part.” Having known divorce from life-experience, I wonder, sitting there in the church pew, “Does the covenant refer to death of the individuals, or death of the marriage?” Either way, commitment leads to grief. I bought an anniversary card for my husband last week. Pictured on the front was a rustic couple in comical attire. Above the picture: “Marriage requires commitment. But so does insanity.” Inside, on a cheerier note: “Still crazy about you after all these years.”

There is no armor to protect us from falling in love, save living a life of not having been loved. Failing to be embraced may make us amateurs at stepping in to the vulnerable mating mess. Or perhaps the unloved jump in more eagerly to fill the hole in their hearts. We find ourselves in love like stepping unwittingly into consumptive quicksand. Any acceptance or rejection of advances will decrease or magnify the love, but won’t prevent it swallowing us like the invasion of the body snatchers.

call-me-by-your-name Recently I saw the film Call Me By Your Name that depicted the infatuation of a teenage boy with a man about six years his senior. How much more vulnerable could the boy be than to fall deeply in love with a person of his own gender, a man who would only be with him in the same Italian estate for a summer’s duration? “Where is this going?” one partner often asks as they couple. Here was a passionate love that showed no hope of continuing to a life of companionship. Still, I (and probably lots of others) applauded as the romance intensified, sensuous and consensual. Does love need a promise of security from heartbreak? I doubt the young boy could muffle his desire, even if he saw the truck rumbling down the road. Both partners could have chosen not to act on their love, though I doubt that too. Passion becomes its own reason for being. And even though the summer ended, and the older man married, there lingers a celebration as if the boy had an experience like climbing Mt. Everest, something the rest of us can only experience vicariously, looking on with envy.

My condolences to those who are “strong” enough to steer clear of love, even loving a pet. My friend who bonded with her cat for twelve fulfilling years, will not get another, now that beloved Chubby Toes is gone. “I could never endure the loss again,” she explains, as I try to drop a soft kitten on her front porch. My friend lives alone. Surely another cat would offer companionship, but a pet also offers loss, death by vulnerability.

Here I go again, I hear those trumpets blow again.
All aglow again, takin’ a chance on love.

It is good that so many classic songs pull their lyrics from love’s risky business. Somehow it makes us one of a huge flock. We may go by violence, but how much sweeter to be vulnerable to love.

IMG_6141[1]

Write When You Get There

by Mary Kollar | Apr 12, 2018 |

“Write when you get there.”

Those were my grandma’s parting words as she waved us up the dirt road from her small Wisconsin farm that sat like an egg in a nest of soft green hills. It was late August, 1950. We might have phoned when we “got there,” but long-distance calls were expensive, involving connections through Millie, the Elk Mound operator, who would alert all on the party-line that Maud and Leon were getting a call. Better to write.

Writing connects people. Certainly, it tells when we have arrived. Think of 19th century Poles, Italians, Irish immigrants, who lined the ocean docks where they waved a permanent farewell to families. From the departing whistle until their final days, I like to imagine the divided families connecting by letters. Stories once told by the hearth would spin themselves in correspondence– long narratives that included incidents lived over weeks and months. Perhaps the newly arrived immigrant sits at a small desk, faintly lit by gas light. He or she has saved the early evening after a long day of labor, to describe poetically a new landscape, from sky scrapers to tenements. Or if the immigration ended in the Midwest, miles of prairie grass as if the world were flat. As the writer continues with pictures and stories, a voice within speaks up reminding the writer of feelings, longings, comparisons between the homeland and the adopted one. By the letter’s end, the epistle looks only vaguely familiar to what the writer intended to say. The reason? Writing is a process, not a product. It is the process of thought. In the process of writing, we learn what it is we have to say. Consequently, writing not only connects between people, it also connects to the cognitive and emotional life within us. Much like wading into an incoming tide, the process of writing may begin in the shallows, but as words flow in, before we know it, we are swimming among ideas we didn’t know we had.

Our church has a small, bi-weekly writing group led by Pastor Debra Jarvis, our Writer-in-Residence. Debra started the group years ago at VA Hospital. Her writers were dealing with PTSD. Writing can be therapeutic, so her group offered a safe place to express trauma. One veteran from the group occasionally joins us, but now the group is primarily a gathering of church members. We bring writing we want critiqued. We also write together in response to a prompt. Then, if time remains, we share what we have written.

Most of us are old enough to have generations of material. A week away from Christmas, I offered the prompt to generate our writing. I selected phrases from several Christmas carols, copying them on red and green slips of paper. The writers chose as many as they wished to initiate thought, or to incorporate somewhere along the way. Nina chose “Oh Holy Night,” and she was off, recalling her 10th year, when prior to Christmas, she and her father walked hand-in-hand five freezing blocks to an evening of Christmas music at the University Christian Church. In the process of writing, she recalled, and so brought to us, her chapped shins where her snow boots rubbed, and the feel of her father’s comforting hand surrounding hers. Nina filled with pride in being the only sibling who had her father all to herself. After reading aloud, Nina leaned back in her chair as if she needed a certain distance to see where her writing had taken her. “Oh my,” she gasped, “I don’t know where that came from. I haven’t thought about that night in over fifty years.” Nina had connected with the child within her, had resurrected a father long dead whom she still loved. In the process of writing, she connected with her inner self. She also connected with us, planting her story in our memory. We regular attendees of the writing group, intimately know our fellow writers, because we carry their stories within us.

Naomi rides the bus to writing group. She notices people and observes mini-street dramas. Then she writes her spare poems, spare like a Japanese scroll where the ink is gracefully minimal, telling everything by telling only a little, and letting the white space suggest meaning.

John is writing his memoir, each week his episodes carrying us to a small Michigan town where his grandfather was pastor of a humble church. John, himself a graduate of seminary, reads his work aloud as if it were a sermon. His resonant voice echoes in our meeting room. He affects his grandfather’s voice in one register, and his grandmother in another. We all feel we have visited Charlevoix, could find our way from the fishing camp to the church.

Ruth is writing about founding a college in Africa. Choosing to tell the story through the voice of the founder, she challenges herself to leave her own body and to incorporate another. I feel the heat of the African sun, and the voice of an African leader embodied in our friend Ruth. Everyone’s stories become our own.

Writing usually wants an audience. Thoughtful writing takes time and solitude until time to publish. I worry how the computer age has truncated that thoughtful process. If you are a tweeter, you barely get your toes wet, much less wade from the shallows to the deeps. If you text or email, you might add a few more words, but it is so easy to “send” before complex thought sets in. And once sent, the receiver’s voice may respond with affirmation or disagreement. Although writing can include dialogue, even inner dialogue, actual conversation with another person while you are in the process of writing can divert you so that soon you are swimming in another river, and a shallow one at that.

Seattle fills concert halls with an audience for writers. This year alone, Ron Chernow, Isabel Allende, and Ta Nehisi Coates attracted hundreds of book lovers so there was not a vacant seat in Benaroya Hall. It doesn’t matter if everyone has read the author’s books. The audience comes to hear celebrative wisdom. Could it be that we consider the words of authors wise because in the process of writing, a mushrooming awareness blooms within the author’s voice? This connection an author makes with understanding comes through the several years it takes to write one book. We in the audience respect the process and consequently applaud the writer who, in one hour, enlightens us.

Not all writing is sent to an audience. One might wonder why anyone should write, lacking intentions to publish. There comes the journal and its audience of one. Two years ago, with Lent approaching, I thought about what I might give up for 40 days. Realizing giving up might be less worshipful than taking on, I decided for Lent I would write a Gratitude Journal, 40 days of contemplating something for which I am grateful. Each day surprised me with another positive gift, my enhanced outlook on life. Articulating my gratitude made me feel good. I wonder how I would feel had I committed to 40 days of complaints. This past Lent, I decided again to write at least a page a day, but without the theme of gratitude. Rarely do I go back to read what I have written, but the seeds are planted in my journal for flowers I will gather in later written discourse.

In the process of writing, I never really “got there.” Even though we did write to relatives to announce our safe arrival home, I continued to write memoirs years later that sent me back to the farm and all of the excitement I felt when I jumped from the hayloft in the barn, or gathered brown eggs in the small basket Grandma saved each summer, just for me.