Category: Uncategorized

What Next?

As my daughter enters her last year of high school, I’ve joined her in pondering the question: where do I see myself in 5 years time? While I love this little house and neighborhood, the idea of no longer having to stay in one spot or to live life according to a school calendar, excites me. So just like Molly, I am researching and dreaming.

While floating out on the Long Island Sound, Rob and I sometimes concoct crazy ideas. He likes barges and imagines us living on this big metal stretch planted with a garden. No groundhogs – I like that. But where to dock? I’ve trawled around houseboat blogs that make it look enticing, but honestly, I think the perpetual rolling motion of being on water would get to me. I love a few hours of heaving-about but mostly, prefer land.

So my latest favorite fantasy involves a RV. Vintage Airstreams appeal to us  but we’re more inclined toward the less-cool, all-in-ones rather than dragging something behind us.  Tootling around at our leisure, we’d explore the country, scour garage sales and thrift-shops for hidden treasures we’d then turn into lamps, chairs and tables to sell to Anthropologie-type stores.

Tetley could come with us… but who would feed the birds?

A Lesson in Relaxation at Half-Price

I know I’ve mentioned before that indulging does not come easily to me. I wonder if it is an Irish thing? Or Catholic or a class phenomenon?  Maybe if I had lots of money, I’d think less of spending $100-plus to make myself feel good. But maybe not. Still, I’d have to carve out the time to get pampered. That’s what’s hard for me — there’s so much else to do, so much else that’s needed… and that little voice says, “really?” I suspect it’s genetic. My sister shares this quality and we sometimes discuss it.  I recall proudly giving my mother a gift certificate for a spa treatment only to see it gather dust on her cluttered dresser past expiration. But I’m determined to reform and this is easier at half-price.

Recently I took advantage of such a deal from  Born of Earth where Heidi gave me a magical massage.  We began the session chatting pleasantly, (Something else I feel compelled to do — like I need to entertain the person working on me while they probably want me to shut up and just get on with it.) but after a few minutes, Heidi wordlessly silenced me. Her power – her ability to converse through her hands with a sense of healing beyond language. With her first touch she found the clench and ache of twisted muscles tucked beneath shoulder blades and running along my spine.

When my hour was up I floated out of the salon to my car where I sat for a few moments feeling too inebriated to drive. A lesson beautifully learned and next time, I’ll even spring for full price.

Why I Hate Groundhogs

In a brief walk around my garden this morning, this is what I found:

Nibbled Tomato Plant
Devoured Spinach
Decimated Gladiolus
Ravaged Black Eyed Susans

But most upsetting of all is this –

Wounded Tetley

That flash of green is his foot wrapped in gauze. To be fair, the groundhog responsible for Tetley having to wear this mortifying cone is dead. He killed 3 in one week. Not the beast of a rodent lurking around here for years, but smaller ones. A 4th adolescent (at least) has been brazenly loping about, teasing my brave hunter who throws himself against the screen door to get at him.

Not a banner garden year, as you can see. Between the weeds and the critters and some scorching days, I’ve lost heart. Not quite given up but certainly disheartened. I drove by a community garden yesterday – all neatly penned-in and bursting with health. How does your garden grow?

About Grief

During the run of Joan Didion’s Year of Magical Thinking  in June, I was invited to write a guest post on grief for the Westport Country Playhouse’s blog. Here it is:

A story not so different than my own
June 27, 2012

My husband died when he was 48.

Photo by Leslie Datsis

The lurking question with a death so young is: How? Was he ill? An accident? We can’t help but rubberneck. Rebelling against the urge to bow to the stigma of shame associated with addiction and suicide, I usually spill my story pretty quickly. I tell them exactly what happened. “I’m so sorry,” is the usual wincing reaction. But often, there is recognition and relief because they have a story not so different from my own.

My daughter was 8 years old when it happened. She felt sure all of her classmate’s lived normal, happy lives. I assured her nobody gets to escape sadness, and brought her to The Den for Grieving Kids in Greenwich. There she gathered with other children who had lost their parents and I joined the surviving spouses. We found comfort in baring our raw hearts. Our own particulars seemed terrible to my daughter and I, but we learned those left behind always have painful and complicated feelings. Over the years of going to The Den, we received and, I like to think also gave, solace to our groups. As lonely as we sometimes felt, it helped knowing we were not alone.

Indeed, memoirs of grief outnumber even celebrity reveal-alls on bookstore shelves. Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking came out a year after my husband’s death. I recognized her language of grief, the trance-like telling of numbness and eventually, the glimmer of feeling again. I still read memoirs of loss compulsively, as if I might find an answer to the myriad of lingering questions I will always bear like a ragged scar. My life is full of joy but not a day passes without at least a passing shadow of memory.

But books like Didion’s or Nina Sankovitch’s elegantly written, Tolstoy and the Purple Chair, remind me that the survivor’s intimate knowledge of mortality is not an awful thing. I know to breathe deeply the air I share for some finite time with my loved ones. To pay attention, to cherish moments and do my best to never be blithe about leave-taking, even for sleep.

Sunday Morning in the Neighborhood

What is it about Sundays? On my street, there is a divine tranquility, almost silence. Garage doors remain closed – no work today for my neighbors. Through the thick hedge, I can see the passing feet of the odd jogger or dogs and owner. No mowers, blowers or hedge clippers yet. Even the not-distant-enough highway sounds soothing — a steady whoosh rarely broken by the squeal or roar of a truck. It will be another hot one later but at 7:00 AM, the cool of night still lingers.

Across the street is a triangle of land owned by the city, overgrown with weeds. My neighbor has called to complain that it needs cutting because it’s hard to see if there is traffic when pulling out from Sterling Place. But from my window, it’s a field of Queen Anne’s Lace. Maybe I’ll don some boots (tick-terror) to cut a bouquet. Then I’ll water the tomatoes, pots of Petunias and herbs. We’ll kayak. But now, this hour of mine before the house and neighborhood really wakes, I savor the morning light, the kaleidoscope of greens, the quiet.

Welcome Summer

Like clock-work, the heat cranked up, the clouds inflated into magical shapes, and the fireflies began their silent summer fireworks. Oh — and much to our dog Tetley’s dismay,  distant neighbors also started prepping for the dread explosions of July 4th. And we’ve had our first wild, summer storm complete with house-shaking thunder. Poor Tetley. He dutifully dons his Thundershirt – but it only makes him look more stylish while barking and running furiously through the house on 3 legs. (although he is much better – pshaw on the surgery!)

High tide was 3 PM yesterday and we launched the kayak out of Calf Pasture beach – my first trip of the season. There was a steady wind pushing us out towards the islands. We let ourselves get blown from shore, lolling lazily on the heaving tide. After an hour or so, we paddled back. We barely spoke.  A meditation beneath the passing clouds on lapping waves. Bliss. 

Admitting I am Powerless

The first of the 12-steps has always been a challenge for me, although I’ve had plenty of lessons. Like when my daughter was born 17 years ago last week — in the wrong country, almost 2 months early. You’d think that physically experiencing my powerlessness, I would have gotten it…

Mind you, there were things I might have done differently. (see, there I go!) I certainly should not have taken a helicopter to a UNICEF meeting 6 months into my pregnancy. Whipped through the sky by the Bora, a fierce wind that blows across the Adriatic in the spring, was like riding a roller coaster. It was the only time in my pregnancy I threw up. I felt her tightly wound up inside of me, my stomach taut. I imagined her holding on to the umbilical cord for dear life as we lurched through the air. Or perhaps it was descending the 17 flights of stairs from my office to the safety of the garage every time Serb shells were lobbed into Zagreb that spring. Maybe if I hadn’t done those things…

Or it may have been Molly’s first declaration of independence, claiming her right to Italian residency, like the smart girl she is. In spite of all our best laid plans, even though we had  plane tickets to England and an apartment rented in Oxford, and a midwife ready to deliver her. Molly’s name is instead, forever inked into the registry of births in an impossibly picturesque town in the heel of Italy. My little (just shy of 5 lbs) premie Italian.  I admit I cannot control a boundless love for her.

 

Tag Sale

We need a new lawnmower and could also use some outdoor furniture. So yesterday, we went to tag sales. Fascinating, and at times, a little ghoulish walking through stranger’s homes, rifling through piles of a lifetime of belongings. Particularly weird are estate sales run by the off-spring. Standing by as strangers paw their parent’s belongings, I think they must hate us. Bargain-hunters inventorying beloved nick-nacks of their childhood cluttering every surface, sticky with years of grime. Assessing asses trying out dad’s favorite chair, haggling over the pyrex. The flotsam of the finished lives of someone they loved.

A red-flag to keep driving is the lemonade stand at the end of the drive. Surely a garage full of plastic toys and baby equipment follows. One driveway was full of divorce fall-out, the man practically giving away his remainders, apparently anxious to pack up his LandRover and be gone. I prefer the happier moving sale, often with the bonus of hearing about the planned adventure. The cheery couple with the stripped down house, laughing neighbors warming the still un-sold couch and chairs, are moving to Florida. We were too late for their lawn mower.

It’s the sales of dead parents stuff that sticks with me. Were people recently living in these claustrophobic homes? The musty rooms packed with old linens that should just be chucked. One house had a room of bizarre and unloved-looking dolls covering every inch of the floor – easily hundreds.  Once upon a time, each of these creatures was brought home as precious, but I wager by Monday, a dumpster will be full of hundreds of staring glass eyes and rigid limbs in a macabre mass burial.

I came home and looked around my house. Imagining someone filling their arms with books, heaving iron skillets off the wall, fingering my scarves, my clutter, I made a decision.  I don’t want to buried under a lot of shit no one really wants. I am cleaning and purging to make room for air and light. That’s really all I need. And a lawn mower.

Beloved Tetley

Tetley tore his ACL. Who knew dogs could do that? I am not even sure what this is except that it seems to happen to people who play sports. And these humans get surgery. The vet was keen to put Tetley under the knife. But surgery is not cheap. And Tetley is no longer a youngster. Nor does he seem like he is pain. In fact, within 2 weeks of injury he now walks slowly on 4 legs again, albeit with a bit of a limp. When he chases squirrels (he just can’t resist) he lifts it up and uses 3 legs. Tripod is his new nickname.

While I was concerned about having him cut open for any procedure at his age (about 10), I confess that it is mostly the money. Paying for such an operation would take too big of a chunk out of my very thin cushion of savings. Maybe if he were to die without it, I would shell it out… I think. Thankfully, this is not a question I have to ask myself now. But it did get me thinking about humans and their pets and the need, at some point, to let go.

My Urban Small Town

Last week’s news in my Connecticut city included headlines like “Man Shot to Death”, “Woman Stabbed” along with the usual smattering of theft and drug arrests. Yet this morning I will join my neighbors at the Memorial Day Parade and feel like I live in a small town. Better actually. Here, families lining up along the parade route, sitting haunch-to-haunch along the curb will be Indian, Polish, Italian, African American, Central American, Brazilian…

We will spot each other’s children on the drums, twirling flags, leaping with their dance troupe. These kids grow up together as friends, seeing knowing no difference, hearing no accents. We will cheer the marching bands – even from rival schools, we will greet our neighbors marching with the fire department, the police force. We’ll even shake hands and smile at the politicians we would never vote for. Cheering, we will acknowledge the diminishing number of old soldiers riding gun-shot in vintage cars, World War II medals proudly displayed on pressed dress uniforms that no longer quite fit. We will stand and applaud solemnly as the memorial float rolls by – the number of losses always up, sadder for being unnecessary.

Sitting on the curb for the hour or so it takes for our city to parade by, I fall a little more in love with Norwalk. It is a struggling city with under-performing schools, gangs and more prevalent and uglier crimes than the surrounding, prettier, wealthier, mostly white suburbs five minutes drive in any direction.  I will walk home with my neighbors, these dear friends of shared history of terrible sadnesses, wonderful joys. The smell of wild roses in the air, our feet soaked from the still-wet grass, we will traipse across the field back to our neighborhood behind city hall. We will inventory who will bring what to the inevitable gathering later in the day, to mark this welcome season, celebrate life, to share the love.

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