Category Archives: Pause Points

Ordinary legacy moments in time.

Resurrection

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Mason

This was holy week, for Christians and Jews.  The energy of this week was at work on many levels.  In the midst of church going, fasting, cooking, gathering and praying little miracles were happening.  Those little miracles are the true resurrection and the light.  Reminders that there is something bigger at work…always.

Little Mason.  He’s the slow one of the three dogs my friend Marlo mothers.  I don’t want to say she owns them because truth be told they actually own her.  They are children in the truest sense of the word.

Wake up one morning, and I mean early morning, to little Mason having a…something…seizure.  Off to the Animal Hospital just minutes away and they can’t seem to find anything wrong.  Take him home and a good night’s sleep turns into another…something….seizure in the later morning.  Off they go again and this time she leaves him.  It’s hard to leave a dog-child at the hospital.  A call comes to get permission to do an MRI and spinal tap.  Of course she says.  The day goes by and finally the results are…something…not all that good.  The spinal cord is being crushed by…something…the blood to his brain is…something.  And on and on in medical speak that could spin your head around.  What to do?  If we do nothing, he will live a fragile life that will degenerate into a fateful decision eventually.

Is there a chance for him, little Mason?  Say what you want about soon to be ex-husbands sometimes they react exactly the way they once would have…in a good way. There is history and shared values from all the good years.  There are means that perhaps you don’t have and a generosity born of…something.   So several hours later and many thousands of dollars later little Mason is better…much better…like not even a little slow now better.  So much better that the doctor wants to write him up in the veterinary journal and follow his progress better.

Praying that God gives you what you need can often lead you to make decisions that will do just that, give you what you need.  Thankfully Mason will be fine.  His siblings, especially Bella, will have him back in a way they’ve never known.  A painful divorce may be imminent but a reliable friendship may emerge.  And a dog mother knows like she knows that her decision was helped by her faith in doing what was needed through a gift from God.

Buona Pasqua

Air Texting

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It’s like texting in the air without having your phone…you mimic real texting…STOP DOING THAT.  RIGHT NOW.   Unless you want to be mistaken for someone who should be rocking back and forth on the psych ward you need to stop.   It looks ridiculous.

It scares me that just the mention of the word text causes people to do this.  Have we lost all sense of being among the living that we are struck by some Pavlovian trigger to move our fingers when we talk about what we said to someone via text message?

There is actually a Facebook page; they call themselves a community, Air Texting Rocks:

air texting

This community is screaming teenage angst.  So far they’ve got 15 Likes, been up since 2010 and hopefully have outgrown being grounded from their phones over the last 4 years.  Who knows?

I get this silliness from teenagers.  I don’t get the trigger response from adults.  I know you think I’m sounding anti-technology but I am actually a fan of technology when it enhances my life.  I was one of the first people shopping on line, paying bills on line, I had, and still have (no snappy remarks) one of the first Tivos.  I love my laptop and even more my IPad.  But when it comes to the phone I know it’s just another piece of equipment.  I use it to make my life easier but it doesn’t define my world.  I feel lucky to have been on the cusp of new technology while still young enough to appreciate it and make it part of my language but old enough to understand that human interaction is key to a long and healthy life.

While waiting to be seating in a restaurant the other night I watched a couple stand side by side each on their own phone.  There was no conversation.  There was literally no interaction.  They had the look of a couple out without the kids, or out after a hard day, or even if it was just out for a quick bite they didn’t speak to each other.  What could be so enthralling on their phones that they didn’t feel the need to speak.  When I’m with my people, I’m with my people.  No phones allowed.  I want to hear what you have to say, I’m interested in you.  If you aren’t interested enough in me to put your phone away for a couple of hours you’re not my people.

with my people

If you can’t speak without air texting you have a problem.  Your technology has become something other than a tool.  It has gotten under your skin and into your brain.  What if technology fails?  Are you self-reliant enough to withstand down time?

Tom Chatfield from the BBC:

If it’s disconcerting that checking my smartphone has become a habit, there’s a particular irony for me: for the last few months, I’ve been involved in a project to design a “code of conduct” for smartphone usage on Australia’s Sunshine Coast. The code comes in seven parts, and aims to help holiday makers stop their smartphones taking over time they’ve set aside for leisure, each other and the place they’re in. Behind it, though, lies something that applies to us all: the need for new etiquettes in an era where shared notions of acceptable behavior lag years, if not decades, behind the tools we’ve incorporated into our lives.

My phone code of conduct? If you call my cell phone after 9 it will go to voice mail.  If you call and I don’t call you back, get over it.  I’ve taken to checking my messages at certain times of the day, I’m not a doctor it’s never an emergency.  Unless, of course, you’re my Mother in which case everything is the end of the world.  If I’m out with friends, not gonna get me because if I’m with you I’m with you.

Most of all, STOP AIR TEXTING, you’re acting like the phone is a phantom limb and it demeans you on so many levels.  You are a person of high intelligence that can certainly have a conversation without it. Surely you must know what to do with your hands while speaking. If you don’t then learn, quickly, before the temptation to rock back and forth sets in next.

 

Hope

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Hope is not a strategy they said.  Taken from the context of some very high level business meetings where someone was trying to get their customer, dealer, vendor, whoever to respond to an incentive, process, threat, whatever. Yeah hope is definitely not a strategy in business.  Hope is more a component.

Hope is truly a component of a life well lived.  For me it’s one of the four H’s; hope, humor, hustle and hide.  None of these components can really stand on their own, none of them is self-sustaining.  They need a little somthin somethin on the side to be effective.

As a literary device hope is a key concept in many classic and contemporary fictional works. It can be used as a plot device and is often a motivating force for change in dynamic characters.  But even here you can clearly see it is only a concept there is nothing concrete happening unless…somethin.

Doesn’t mean I don’t love the phrase.  I loved it the minute I heard it.  It’s one of those stop in your tracks phrases that remind you every time you use a word like hope to look a little further.

One of the symbols of hope is the Swallow in Aesop fables and numerous other historic literature.  It symbolizes hope, in part because it is among the first birds to appear at the end of winter and the start of spring

Spring actually begins for me on April 1st.  I’m not good in March, it holds too much blah blah for me.  Too much what if and too much sorrow for me to welcome Spring on its actual arrival date.  So on April 1st I hoped somethin would bring some welcome relief from this very hard winter.

Through dinner with friends, good news from friends and even better weather than expected my hope was fulfilling itself nicely.   The emergence of my garden always fulfills my hope for welcome relief.  There is always that one day that the sun and my energy converge and begin the process of cleaning out the back garden, hanging the rug over the railing and giving it a good beating, uncovering the tiny little poke-throughs that just can’t help coming up before the hard frost fear is over.

This weekend brought me sunshine and wind to blow the leaves all the way to the edge of the enchanted forest.  It brought rug beating with no choking or sneezing thanks again to the wind. It brought out mineral oil for the wood furniture and cushions, if only temporarily.

It brought the first pansies to the garden centers and dirt under my fingernails.  It brought the end of the indoor farmers market and the anticipation of the outdoor market with its strawberries and asparagus and peas.

So while hope is not a strategy, on this weekend, it was a call to move, walk, beat, scrub, to welcome Spring and continue to hope for more.

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Rules of the Road

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bus in the rearview mirror

Driving north on Washington Avenue in my hometown yesterday I heard, before I saw, the fire trucks headed my way.  As the line of cars ahead of me began to slow and move to the right the first truck came around the corner, screaming sirens, lights flashing and here comes someone alongside me on the left trying to pass.  The fire truck had to swerve a bit and hit its horn, if you thought the siren was loud this horn made it perfectly clear he should get the hell out of the way.  I don’t know what came over me, perhaps it was the thoughts of my Father on this anniversary of losing him nine years ago, perhaps it was the stupidity of this jackass but I couldn’t help launch into a blistering tirade on the rules of the road.  From the confines of my car I wanted to know who the hell this stupid bastard (a favorite expression of my father’s for use in cases just like this) thought he was putting these people, who were volunteering to race into a burning building, in danger.   As I started my tirade the next truck came toward us and this guy must have caught on and jumped in front of me and slowed down a bit.  On I went with my tirade, making it perfectly clear that under no circumstance should you ever put these people in danger and that you should summon up all the respect you can for the people doing this job for no pay both on and off the road. I was pretty animated. The man in the car ahead of me thought he understood why I was carrying on and offered that I go ahead of him.  I assured him he could go and it had nothing to do with him cutting in front of me.  I would rather he be in front of me.  My father always pointed out that people like him, before we had any understanding of Karma, were accidents waiting to happen and it would be best if you could see them when they made their last wrong move. Then you could react and avoid being caught up in their bullshit (he was a fan of that word too).

These were my Father’s words but certainly not at this decibel (ever) or with this ferocity (ever).  When teaching me to yield to emergency vehicles he simply stated that he never wanted to hear that I got pulled over for not doing so.  There was no drama, just the facts of a small town where you might get pulled over, you might not get a ticket, but your family would surely hear about it at some point. Probably at the bar over a beer shared after work one day. Life in a small town for a daughter, of a Father that everyone knew, that was a bit “high-spirited” could be a little precarious.  He knew what he was up against.

These were just the unwritten rules of his road.  They were written somewhere I’m sure but for me they were his.  My Father drove for our local dry cleaner for 40 something years and when he had spare time he went for a ride.  He loved to drive.  When he could no longer drive, I had the unfortunate business of taking his beloved license from him; he loved to be taken for a ride.  He knew all our local roads and he taught us any number of unwritten rules, like always know several ways to get home, pull as far to whichever side you are turning so the guy behind you can get around you, always use your signal, and never use your horn.  If you can yield to a delivery man you’ll make his life easier.  To this day I let the “working people” go ahead of me.  Never be the last person through the one lane anything, hang back let the other side go. Be that person that enjoys the road and leave the hysterics to the other guy.

I’m sure the unwritten rules he gave me were different from the ones he gave my sister.  I remember him getting in the car with me for the first time and saying where should we go.  It wasn’t like he didn’t know I had already been driving for several years.  Someone always had a car and I learned what I could from them.  I could do a mean jack rabbit with my friend Paul’s 62 Falcon with the shift on the column…but I digress.  My sister always talks about some double line rule that will always take you home.  I never had that particular discussion with my Father, we each had hand tailored discussions based on our personalities and our age difference.

I get my love of driving from him, I drive wherever I can and these days he would be over the moon to see what I’m driving.  I know like I know I can get home from anywhere and made it my business to put the girls in the car and explore my new neighborhood as soon as I could.

I’m glad he wasn’t around to see the advent of texting while driving, or putting makeup on while driving or the ever present road rage.  He used to drive during the day and be surrounded by “housewives and money hungry salesmen”.

He used to say that the best he could hope for on a busy day is that the school bus would be in the rearview mirror.  Yeah, that’s still true for me too. And yeah, his driving lessons, his driving legacy are secure, how often I wish others knew and followed them. Miss you.

 

 

Pazzia

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English translation from Italian, lunacy.  So apparently I wasn’t the only one believing that this was a bad moon but is there really any such thing?  Does the full moon really have the mystical power to induce lunacy?  Does the state of “moonstruck” trigger erratic behavior, increase drunkenness, traffic accidents, homicides (ok I stopped short of homicide) and arrests (no bail money was needed this time)?   Why else would police departments, emergency rooms and suicide hot lines add personnel to cope with the “heightened incidents”?

Believe it or not the jury is still out on the validity of lunacy, originally referring to insanity of an intermittent kind attributed to changes of the moon.  There are, of course, several theories; the most widely held has to do with the effect of the full moon on water.  Miami psychiatrist, Arnold Lieber, “the full moon’s supposed effects on behavior arise from its influence on water. The human body, after all, is about 80 percent water, so perhaps the moon works its mischievous magic by somehow disrupting the alignment of water molecules in the nervous system.”  Not many in the scientific community are buying it, seems the gravitational effects of the moon are tiny tiny tiny. And the water that is affected by the moon is open water, and the effects are the same for the new moon, which we can’t even see.

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More and more studies are not endorsing the lunacy theories of the ages.  More and more studies are pointing toward….urban legend.  Hollywood has helped with the legend part of it, nothing short of a full moon will do as the music rises and the scream is imminent.  Please.

One of the more interesting theories was raised by Charles L. Raison, Emory University. He seemed to think that the effect may have been genuine at one time; before the advent of outdoor lighting the bright light of the full moon deprived people who were living outside of sleep.  Ok, I have never lived outside but I can assure you no amount of black out blinds, drapes can prevent the full moon from seeping into my bedroom at night.  This theory I can work with.

Whatever your beliefs the full moon does…something.  I’m not sure what but I know like I know that the end of last week brought me to a table in a little dive bar with four other women who, unprovoked (except that they read my post last week) sat down hard and said this was a bad moon.

Each had a story of crazy customers, spouses, children and they were sticking to it.  That said, I can’t think of a better way to end a full moon week than with these women.  The laugher and stories just kept coming.  Our only similarity is that we work in the same business, we are each  very different people but together we made an otherwise difficult week manageable.  I hadn’t laughed all week and here I hadn’t stopped.

One of these wonderful women caught my eye and said, you did this.  You got us here.  What a wonderful compliment.  There was a moment just after that when I felt as if I was out of body, the background noise faded away and as I looked around the table at these women, who each had their own life rant going on, I knew (like I knew) that this week was truly done.  I believe they knew it to.  It’s no wonder we vow to do this each month, so no one gets hurt including each of us.