Grace

 

Through many dangers toils and snares

I have already come,

‘Tis grace that brought me safe this far

And grace will lead me home.

 ~Amazing Grace, by John Newton

 

 I sat in church last Sunday and listened to our choir singing these words.  This is my favorite verse of one of my favorite hymns, and as many times as I’ve heard it and sung it, it had special meaning for me last week. 

Whether one calls it grace or faith or luck, there is something that keeps us moving forward through all kinds of adversity, something that mends broken hearts, strengthens tired spirits, gives us the courage to pick ourselves up and go on.  It is truly amazing, and I’m thankful for it.

May today bring you and yours all the grace you need, for whatever reason you need it.

Happy Thanksgiving.

 

Home Again

This is one of my favorite pathways in Island Walk – it follows one of the larger lakes that are embedded throughout the five square miles of this community.  Late yesterday afternoon, I took my customary stroll, thinking ahead to next month when we will (hopefully) be back with Magic and Molly along.  This is their favorite pathway as well, and bringing them down in the dead of winter is quite a treat.  Suddenly, it’s summer again, and there is a new spring in their step since daily walks no longer involve coats or ice balls on tender paws.

Of course, traveling with two dogs is quite an undertaking, and requires extra time and money, both of which are in rather short supply here this year.  When we’ve brought the dogs to Florida in winter’s past, we’ve taken three days to make the 1500 mile trip.  This time, mostly because of time constraints, we might try to reach our destination in two days, which means over nine hours of travel time per day.  The dogs are superb travelers – but it’s the humans who get tired!

It was a good trip, these past few days – not long enough, but welcome and appreciated.   We did some very nice, vacation-like things, enjoyed some time with our son and daughter-in-law, who coaxed us into a (surprisingly!) fun try at playing Beatles Rock Band on their Wii™, and had some maintenance done on our car (the 98 Pontiac Trans Am we keep down there) to keep it in good working order for the winter. 

I did not open the work folder I brought with me.  It came home untouched, and I will deal with the ramifications of that on Monday.  It was simply too important to just rest this time, to leave behind the world of medical reporting and insurance company requirements, and immerse myself in the world of sunshine, quiet pathways, and arched bridges.

I read quite a bit  and finished two delightful novels – The Family Man, by Elinor Lipman, and Knit the Season, the latest installment in Kate Jacobs series about the women of the Friday Night Knitting Club.  Both were perfect relaxation reads – well written with good stories and interesting characters.  Though quite different, both novels touched on the importance of family connections, and of making those connections a priority in our daily lives.   This is something that’s been on my mind quite a bit in the past few months, so these novels were very compatible with my current mindset.

Today we came home to a rather nice fall day, nice enough to go for a walk (alas, no lake views or bridges to traverse).After the walk, and trip to the library where I was greeted with an embarrassment of riches on the reserve shelf with my name on them, I came home and settled in with a cup of tea and my latest bookstack.  That’s Molly on her favorite perch.

It was good to get away – but it’s alright being home again.  I don’t suffer the disconnect I once did when we returned from Florida.  Perhaps I’ve grown accustomed to having a fragmented family, for that’s what it is, really.  With my son and daughter-in-law, as well as my father living in Florida, half of my closest family members live far away from me.   It took a while to come to terms with that, but I believe I’ve made some sort of peace with it.  

But I’ve also learned, especially in the last few months, how precious time can be, and how terribly capricious fate -  one minute the people we love are with us, and in the next they can be gone forever.

In the end, home is wherever you can be with the people you love the most.

How about you?  If you’re home, are you happy to be there?  If not, where would you rather be?

A Lost Art

“I can relax really well here,” my husband says, propping his feet on the ottoman and settling comfortably into the chair.  We’re sitting on the lanai at our home in Florida, watching the sun set behind the pond across the road.  His bottle of Yuengling beer sits comfortably next to my glass of Clos du Bois chardonnay, each one ever so slightly beaded with sweat.

I forbear from making any remarks about his ability to relax at home (which appears legendary to me), because I know what he’s talking about.  I can relax really well here, too.  

Perhaps it’s this community we live in, a gated community, but one very expansive in style and scope, with lots of open spaces, wonderful walkways marked with arched bridges over ponds of every size, plenty of wildlife (herons, osprey, ducks, and even an occasional ‘gator).   Perhaps it’s the size of the house itself, larger by far than our aging little bungalow at home, bright and open and shiny new.  It could be the nearness of our son, who lives just down the road thereby eliminating that ever present sense of impending danger felt by parents who are thousands of miles away from their children.

Whatever the reason, I don’t feel the relentless push to get things done that drives me when I’m home.  I’m able to slow down without feeling guilty, sit quietly on the lanai or in the den and read halfway through a novel at one sitting rather than snatching a quick chapter here and there.  I’ll watch an entire two hour movie from start to finish, or wander around the neighborhood slowly, taking note of tropical plants and flowers I never see in the mid-west. 

So, yes I can relax quite nicely here.

Relaxing is something of a lost art in our Western culture.   We hear a lot about “relaxation techniques” – yoga, meditation, biofeedback – all sorts of externally induced ways to relieve the stress which seems endemic to modern life.  Now there are even “relaxation drinks” (the opposite of beverages like Red Bull), with names like iChill and Mary Jane’s Relaxing soda, cocktails containing herbs like valerian root and rose hips, which promise to smooth away the anxieties of the day and help you ease into a state of relaxation.

But true relaxation can’t be bottled or packaged, can’t be massaged  into tense muscles or beamed into frayed nerve endings.  It’s really a very personal state of mind and spirit.  For me, the key ingredient is time…having time stretched before me without a long list of obligations attached to every second.  My time at home is fraught with those kinds of lists, and they seem to grow exponentially in my head.  Here, not so much…so I allow myself the luxury of taking time, of worrying less about what I’m accomplishing and just being.

It’s an art I should practice more often, I think.  And probably you should, too.

How about you?  What does it take for you to really relax?

 

Pretty Good Day

Today was a pretty good day. 

I can make that statement with certainty, because I’ve had some really terrible days in the past few months.  Days when I literally had to make life and death decisions for people I loved.  Days when I had to sort through the belongings of those same people and decide what they should be buried in.  Days when I sat staring at lists of bills and endlessly adding up numbers in my head, trying to make the bottom lines come out somewhere within arms reach.

But today wasn’t that kind of day at all.  Oh, there were frustrations.  At work, one of our client’s appointments got moved up from next week to tomorrow, which necessitated that I drop everything I had planned to do for the day and get all their paperwork and medical records in order.  At home, the pork tenderloin I planned to cook for dinner smelled a trifle off, and so I had to come up with something else.

Everyday dilemmas, quite delightful in their normalcy.

It’s all about perspective, isn’t it?  The things that once seemed insurmountable often pale in comparison to the real trials and traumas of life.  I suppose that’s one of the gifts of growing older, having enough experience of life’s vicissitudes to really understand what’s traumatic and what’s nothing more than an annoyance. 

I can be grateful for the small trials and tribulations like todays, because I’ve had days of such overwhelming sadness. I can wrap myself around the small moments of happiness – like watching the sun glinting on a pile of golden leaves, or seeing Magic curl up next to Molly and prop his head on her back.  I can laugh out loud at my friend’s jokes, and revel in the sound of Bon Jovi turned up full blast on my car stereo.   I can (almost) stop being afraid of what the day will bring.

Today was a pretty good day.

I hope it was for you too.

 

The End of the Tunnel

It may be the sunshine and unseasonably warm temperatures…

It may be that I’ve had three days off in a row…

Or it may be that I’m beginning to see some light at the end of this dark tunnel I’ve been traveling through…

Whatever the reason, I awoke this morning feeling  ~dare I say? ~ hopeful ~ for the first time in a long while.  As if the tipped axis my world has spun upon for the past four months might be starting to right itself.  As if I might begin to breath easy once more, to stop looking for danger and disappointment around every corner, to actually smile and really mean it.

The heavy anvil of heartache may be lifting, my friends, and I’m delirious with excitement.

Looking back on the things I’ve been writing here, I see how deeply enmeshed in sorrow I’ve been.   I want that to change in the days ahead, want to find the source of my writer’s eye once again, and particularly want that source to focus on the positive aspects of life in general.  I want to believe that life can be bright and beautiful, that some of my dearest dreams will come true, and that I will be happy again.

 For the past three years, this space has been where I’ve come to express my feelings about life in general and my own in particular.  I think each one of us has a unique personal story that bears telling to the world, a story that reflects a deeper meaning on this roller coaster ride we call life.   We travel the road together, my friends, and sharing our experience is a way of learning from it and making it meaningful.  Sometimes the days are dark, and we need to huddle together to find a glimmer of hopeful light.  And when the darkness lifts, we can’t wait to share the joy and spread the beacon of hope.

In the weeks ahead, look  for some changes here at the Byline.  Perhaps a makeover, a shiny new space to match this shiny new beginning that’s rising in my spirit.  

I want this journey into the future to be a happy one.

And I hope you’ll all come join me.

 

Women at Work

Last spring, I was sitting a lunch with my co-workers, several of whom are young mothers, and they were discussing the woes associated with finding (and keeping) good daycare/preschool situations.  “This is the third preschool we’ve gone to this year,”  Anna moaned.  “Josh had just gotten to know the teacher and made a few friends, and now they’re closing!”  Not surprising, of course, but the stagnant economy here in Michigan affects daycare and preschools too, and they find themselves unable to stay in business.

As this discussion swirled around me, I reminded myself to give my husband a hug, kiss, and a big thank you when I got home.  For what? you’re asking.  Well (and I apologize if this offends anyone’s feminist sympathies), for working so successfully and so hard all those years ago when I was a young mother, so that I could stay home with our son and not have to worry about daycare and preschool.  I didn’t fully appreciate it at the time, of course, and especially not when he was away from home long hours, or traveling for weeks on end.  Looking back, however, life was quite a lark for me in those days.  I was able to set my own schedule, play with my child as much as I liked, dabble in music and writing as much or as little as I wished.  I had family and friends nearby for support.  Life was good.

I didn’t remember to thank Jim that night, and although it occurred to me to do so quite a few times over the ensuing few weeks, the timing wasn’t right for some reason, or our conversation got sidetracked before I found the words to mention it. 

And then came July 1, and my husband lost his job.

About a month later, I’m offered the opportunity to increase my own part time work into a full time position, with a nice raise in pay. 

So now I’m the one away from home, working long hours.  I’m the one who feels pressured to meet deadlines, to skirt around the boss’  moods and temperaments, to work according to someone else’s schedule. 

I’m the one…and I’m not liking it so much.  Here’s what’s bothering me - I really, really miss the freedom and flexibility to live life on my own terms.  Dwelling deep within my outwardly placid and agreeable nature, there is a small rebellious streak that despises being accountable to another person for my time.  It’s this demon that ties my stomach into knots when my boss gripes that I haven’t properly cleared my schedule with her.  It’s this demon that brings a string of  stifled curses to my lips when a huge assignment is passed onto me because someone else dropped the ball.   It’s this demon that brings tears to my eyes on occasion as I’m driving into the office and thinking about how much I’d rather be home drinking coffee in my favorite chair, or walking in the park with my dogs.

But now I’m the one who goes bustling out the door every morning while my husband stays home drinking coffee and reading e-mail.  It’s actually a common phenomenon, I understand, especially here in Big 3 territory, where so many wives of unemployed automotive company workers are now the breadwinners of the family.  It seems that women’s jobs, so often centered in service type industry and professions, have been spared more often than those of their husbands.  The husbands – mine included – are now picking up the slack at home, learning to handle all manner of domestic duties.

I’ve always considered myself a “working woman.”  Even in the days when I wasn’t bringing home a regular paycheck, I was involved in numerous activities inside and outside of my home.  When I first began working for pay about 15 years ago, I was able to retain a good balance between the work I was doing and the demands of my family and personal life.  Now, for the first time, the balance is skewed in favor of work, and this is where the difficulty lies.  But this is the lifestyle my husband lived for the better part of our marriage.  He spent years of his life eking out small bits of personal time from his hectic and demanding schedule.  I don’t for one minute begrudge him some time now to rest and regroup, for even though it was forced upon him against his will, it is well deserved after 30 years of relentlessly hard work.

The other day I stumbled in the door, exhausted and grumpy, and tossed a satchel of reports I’d carted home onto the couch.  “I’ve never thanked you properly before,” I said to him, “but I’m doing so now. I don’t know how you did it all those years.”

“Did what?” he asked, genuinely confused.

“Worked every darn day!” I said.  “I could never have done that.  And I really appreciate it.”

He shrugged.  “You don’t think it about it really,” he answered.  “You just do it.”

Ah, so that’s the secret. 

You just do it.

 

Stacked Up

When I was a little girl, one of my favorite games was playing office.  Our first home had a half-second story, one big room tucked under the attic, with a sloping ceiling and one small window that overlooked the sidewalk.  There was a wooden desk tucked into that alcove, with an old-fashioned manual typewriter and a vintage adding machine, the kind you operated with a pull down handle.  At the age of 3 and 4, you’d find me up there happily pounding away on that old Remington, writing all kinds of “important” letters, and adding long columns of numbers.

When I was a bit older, we moved to another home, but my home office went with me.  My dad had a big desk in the basement, with lots of drawers – he didn’t use it much, but I surely did.  My typewriter (by now I’d graduated to a Smith Corona electric) was seated smack in the middle, and I used one of my dad’s cast off electric adding machines (I can still hear that funny little whirr it made when you pressed the “=” sign.) 

Yes indeed, I  loved playing office in those days.  Sometimes I pretended to be a lawyer, other times a magazine editor.  But whatever make believe career I embarked upon, they all required lots of paperwork, because I loved paper.  My fervent wish in those days was to spend my life playing with words on paper.

Well, as they say, be careful what you wish for.

Fast forward several decades to 2009, and I find myself sitting a desk every day, my computer with a large flat screen monitor front and center, calculator at hand, and absolutely surrounded by paper.  Stacks upon stacks of paper.

Not only does my daily job require tons of repetitious and seemingly redundant paperwork, the events of the past three months have found me drowning in a good deal of personal paperwork as well – namely, all the paperflow involved in settling my aunt and uncle’s estate.

How does one cope when one’s dream comes true and then turns into a nightmare?

I’m looking for ways to crawl out from under this mountain of papers…any ideas?

 

One More Goodbye

At least no one has died this time.

This goodbye is a somewhat happier occasion, as tomorrow marks the retirement of our senior pastor, a man who led our flock of Presbyterians for the last 20 years, taking the church at a time when it was near death’s door and breathing new life into it, growing it to over three times its size in people and program.

We’re happy for him, because, as he said at his gala retirement banquet on Thursday, he is definitely “going out on top.”  He’s healthy, relatively young, he’s left a good, strong mark in the work he’s done.  His congregation fervently hates to see him go.   It’s really the perfect time to ride off into the sunset, in the style of the Western sagas he loves so much.

But still.

Another goodbye?  Really?

On my way into banquet hall Thursday night, we happened to meet up in the parking lot.  “Hey, sweetie!” he said, giving me a hug.  “It’s good to see you! How’re you holding up?”

“I’m hanging in there,” I told him, hugging back.  “You know, I feel badly that I haven’t been in church very much, that I’ve missed your last few sermons.”

“Hey,” he said, with his trademark crooked grin.  “I know you’ve had your fill of goodbyes lately.”

And that’s just one of the reasons we all love this man.  He gets people.  Understands the human condition, in all it’s glory and gloom.  Knows that, though he’d prefer to retire quietly with no fuss and fanfare, the congregation needs to fete and honor him six ways from Sunday.  So he graciously sits through long pot luck dinners and fancy banquets, he smiles at the jokes and tears up appropriately (and genuinely) at the tributes.  He’s a good sport when the choir plops a cowboy hat on his head and sings “Happy Trails to You.”   Because he understands that it’s part of the process we need to go through in order to let him go.

One of the speakers at the banquet referred to him as a man “perfectly suited to the ministry.”  It’s a wonder, isn’t it, when people can do what they are “perfectly suited” to doing?  And it doesn’t happen often in this life.  I thought about that a lot on Friday, as I sat at my computer at work, typing faxes and organizing files, trying to read the chicken scratch of a doctor’s handwriting on this latest medical record review.   It’s not work to which I’m perfectly suited by any means…although I do it well enough, when I look at it in light of the accomplishments of a man like our minister, it pales to nothingness in comparison.

Of course, nowadays one has to be grateful for having gainful employment at all, no matter how “suited” you are to the occupation.  And I’m lucky ~ I pretty much know what I’m perfectly suited to doing, and I still get to do on occasion.

But it would be a fine thing indeed to have spent one’s entire career in pursuit of something that fed the soul as well as the stomach, that put fire in the spirit as well as in the furnace.  I can say with certainty that Reverend Rick Peters has done that during his 45 years in the ministry.  And I wish him Godspeed in the years ahead.

Although I really hate saying Goodbye.

Fallish

I’m disappointed in Michigan this fall.  We’ve had nothing but dismal, bone chilling days for the entire month of October,going directly from Capri pants and t-shirts to winter jackets and gloves, with nary a stop in-between for fuzzy sweaters.  There’s a leaden, gunmetal grey pall over the entire state, and not even the vibrant colors on our maples, elms, and oaks can dissipate it.

In some ways, it’s fitting…I was almost dreading the splendor that adorns this state in the waning days of its season.  Autumn has a glorious bittersweetness to it, one I usually revel in, but one that can sometimes be almost too emotional to bear.  This fall, with all the losses still so fresh in my heart, I was almost afraid of all that fierce beauty, flaunting itself at death.

These trees are in my neighbor’s yard, and greet me when I open the drapes first thing in the morning.  The photo is from last fall, for we’ve not seen any patches of sky that blue so far this month.

Ah well, there’s still November.

Bell-issima

Several months ago, I promised my friends in Classical Bells that I would join them in the recording they were scheduled to make on October 19, out in a small recording studio in Ann Arbor.  A couple of times each year, they do  demo recordings for one of the larger publishers of handbell music.  This fall’s batch of new tunes included a couple of  piano/bell combo pieces, so they asked if I’d do the piano parts.

As is par for the course with Classical Bells, things always turn out to be more involved than you would expect.  Actually, that’s just the nature of music in general.  So a gig that started out being just one easy piano piece, turned into one easy and one not so easy piano piece, plus “garbage bells” on first one, then two, then three bell pieces.  Then, Jim got involved on a piece where the bass bell ringers needed some extra muscle. 

But I’m not complaining.  Far from it, in fact.  Yesterday’s rehearsal reminded me once again of the restorative power of music making.  Because I went in dragging my residual yoke of sadness, the one that seems perpetually tied to my shoulders, and came out with a definite spring in my step and a considerably lighter heart.  For the first time in a long time, I felt as if I were where I needed to be, doing what I was meant to do. 

And once again, I realized how important it is for everyone to have something they’re passionate about.  For me, it’s music.  For my friend Kim at work, it’s running…and though I couldn’t run  26 miles if my life depended on it, I understand her excitement about the marathon this weekend, the one she’s been training for the past six months.  It’s the same excitement I feel about preparing for a special concert, like the ones we did with the Detroit Symphony several years ago.  And it’s the same sense of satisfaction and pride whether  you’re crossing a finish line or listening to the last tones resounding in the air. 

Whether you’re a musician, an artist, a writer, or an athlete, it’s this passion, this sense of satisfaction, this feeling of all’s right-ness, that helps us survive everything from the occasional boredom of everyday jobs to the searing pain of grief and loss. 

So I’m thankful for my moments of music, and thankful for the friends who invite me to share with them.

Bellisima.