Crap or fertilizer?

Another holiday season, another chance to confront the relative(ly) un-Norman Rockwellness of my family.

And here I was, thinking this would be a pretty dandy holiday, since I don't have to visit any next-of-kin in jail.

That's probably about as high as my expectations should get. Hoping for more is just a ticket to the blues.

Earlier this week, I read something a failed stockbroker named Bill Wilson wrote 48 years ago. Bill knew a thing or two about the blues and disappointment, failure and dead dreams.

"Though I still find it difficult to accept today's pain and anxiety
with any great degree of serenity -- as those more advanced in the
spiritual life seem able to do -- I can give thanks for present pain
nevertheless.

I find the willingness to do this by contemplating the lessons
learned from past suffering -- lessons which have led to the
blessings I now enjoy."

So yes, I am sad today, basting in a bitter sauce of self-pity. Despite my prayers, unsolicited advice, and shining good example, I can't make someone I love stop destroying his life.

He, like I do, suffers from a disease of body, spirit and mind that left untreated causes the sufferer to violate all his values and destroy everything he/she loves.

This downward spiral does not take holidays off, either. If anything, holidays escalate the going downhillness.

I am watching someone else very dear to me struggle and suffer the consequences of very bad decisions. Decisions remarkably like ones I myself made, and suffered for, two decades ago.

It occurs to me the only difference between crap and fertilizer is what grows out of it.

A few holidays ago, I was estranged from my son and had no idea where he was, alive or dead. So I decided to give money I would've spent on his presents to a recovery program for teenage addicts.

Last year, instead of presents for ourselves, we asked for donations to a residence for people on very limited incomes who would otherwise be homeless. A place he lived, briefly, and that was an island of stability and goodness in a sea of chaos.

Being unable to waste money on stuff for someone who wouldn't really appreciate it, created an opportunity to start a new tradition of giving to those less fortunate.

And it reminded me that unselfish giving makes me happy.

If I don't get too hung up on who gets the gift, but focus more on the fact that I am able to give to someone who needs things I generally take for granted, then I am much happier.

No, life is not turning out the way I'd hoped. For me, that is good news, because my life turned out better than anything I could have hoped.

My failure to live the life I dreamed of gave me a life beyond my wildest dreams.

Maybe my loved ones' failures will become their greatest blessings one day.

I can only hope.

Nothing to offer

I think one of the hardest lessons I learned was the slow, humbling realization that my parents had something to offer.

Oh, I'd been happy to take much they gave me. The piano lessons, braces on my teeth, the ballet classes, my first car. And French horn, god love them, they let me learn to play the French horn and rented an instrument far too extravagant for a single-income family on a state employee's salary to buy outright. They paid for private French horn lessons, too. Maybe their greatest sacrifice was simply living in a one-story ranch-style house with a 6th grader learning to play a French horn.

THAT is sacrifice.

I took all this stuff and a lot more. But, the idea that they had wisdom, experience, maybe even advice to offer? No, thanks. No way I wanted to be like them. Nothing like them.

The bittersweet truth that karma brings back around, like the endless wheel of life itself, is that, of course, I am like them. My pattern was cut from their material. I got my dad's monkey knuckles, my wrinkled hands like an albino chimp's, just like his. I got my mother's overbite and prematurely gray hair.

It finally dawned on me that my folks might be worth listening to, occasionally, in very small doses, for a couple of reasons.

One is that I'm watching friends agonizing through the slow-motion marathon of grief as Alzheimer's disease devours their parents.

Another is that I now see my grown kids getting battered and bumped around by life. Sometimes through no fault of their own. More often the consequences, unavoidable as gravity, of dumb decisions or bad choices.

The same dumb decisions and bad choices I made decades ago. Not exact carbon copies of my mistakes, but close enough cousins that I could've warned you when I saw them coming. Only heartache waits for you behind that door. Keep moving.

That guy who harbors a deep, bitter resentment against his mom? Not good marriage material.

The insane obsession that this time, it will be different, and now you can drink like a gentleman. You've learned to control it and it won't control you? That idea has to be smashed for people with our allergy. The allergy you inherited from me.

All these painful lessons, and the happiness, serenity and joy that resulted from learning to make different choices. Could I have arrived here faster, sooner, if I'd been willing to learn from my elders? Could I spare my dear ones any tears or make their road any less harrowing?

No, I can't. Because I have nothing to offer them.

Mean Girls

When I was in high school, I was on our drill team, the Lanier Vikettes (our mascot was the Viking, so naturally, we were Vikettes).

It was a Big. Damn. Deal. in my school. Our football team was pathetic, so the highlight of football games was half time and baby, we were it.

Our instructor, Ms. King, was a pivotal figure in many girls' lives. Imagine Sue Silvester with a big infusion of Southern drawl and religion. She called the drill team girls her "kids." Many adored her. She wore white sneakers with those little footie socks with the colored pompoms on the heels.

When I was a sophomore, we traveled to California to win the national championship. Seriously, this part of drill team was cool. We did incredible routines on full-size ladders, we tap danced--imagine 70-some-odd girls primly marching out to the middle of a Texas football field, each girl carrying a 3-foot square of painted plywood we placed on the turf so that we could tap dance...we did a chair routine with the standard high kicking and so on, that ended in a crescendo of our chorus lines standing one foot on the chair back, one foot on the chair seat, arms locked, tipping the chairs over in perfect unison. Ta-Da!

There was only one problem with this.

Vikettes were mean girls.

They were a clique, and there were cliques within cliques. The insiders and the outsiders. The favorites and the non-favorites. Ms. King had her favorites, and then there were the rest of us.

I suppose all of high school is like this. And, all of adult life, too. But, Vikettes, you see, we were supposed to be some kind of role model. Examples. You could get kicked out for smoking. Cigarettes. There was a lot of high-minded moralizing about "making this world a better place" in Vikettes.

So, as much as I liked the tap dancing and the clambering up on 6-foot ladders to dangle off of them, gracefully, mind you, I never fit in. I could not find even an outsiders clique to fit into.

It was very lonely.

One day, before a dress rehearsal, we were all changing clothes behind the big curtain on the school gym stage. There was one girl, one of the "insiders," the special group that Ms. King liked best of all, and this girl was one of the quieter, shyer members of the elites. I can still see her now, big brown eyes, very pale skin, dark hair with bangs. She was a skinny girl except for her very large breasts and she was self-conscious about them. One of her pack, one of her "friends" snatched her bra away from her and started hooting and pointing. She was making a big scene and cracking jokes, while holding her "friend's" bra just out of reach.

As the poor skinny girl tried to cover her outsized chest with one arm and flail out with the other hand, trying to grab at her bra and hide herself at the same time, her tormentor found this hilarious. And the rest of her pack did too.

Tears were running down the humiliated girl's face. The "popular girls" found this just uproariously funny.

I was horrified. I felt ashamed of myself for not stepping in to stop it. Nope, I just gawked, like I do at car wrecks. I watched in dumb, sick paralysis at this vicious attack on a sensitive person's tender self-image.

I went to Ms. King and snitched on these girls, reporting the incident with all the moral outrage and indignation a 15-year-old can muster.

And you know what I got? A lecture. On being judgmental. I was told that I did not know what other people were dealing with and I could not judge if I did not walk in their shoes.

Now, it's true that my real motivation might just have been to tarnish some of the shine of these favorite girls, rather than a desire to right a wrong and defend the victim. Maybe I really was hoping that Ms. King would favor me, defender of all that is right and true. She would recognize MY effort to "make this world a better place," and I could bask in the sunshine of her approval, instead of those mean, undeserving girls.

That didn't happen.

Not long after this, we had try-outs for Vikette officers. The election favored a popular girl who forgot her own routine and stood in the middle of the gym, kind of pantomiming "oopsie, silly me!" while her music played on...well, that was really the last straw for me. It's one thing to have pretty teacher's pets who are vicious and ugly on the inside. It's another to have a national championship-caliber drill team electing officers who cannot even remember their own dance routines.

I quit Vikettes. My mother was devastated. There was more than a little bit of living vicariously through the glory of the daughter in drill team.

I had the weird distinction of being the only girl in my high school who had ever quit Vikettes who was not pregnant. I felt people watching me for a while, wondering when the bump would start to show.

But I wasn't pregnant. I was just over it.

And, as a result, I got to do so many other fun things. Act in plays with the drama club. Edit the school's literary magazine. Sing in varsity choir and write for the yearbook.

Leaving Vikettes allowed me to release my inner nerd, and it was a very good thing.

Oh, and the girl standing next to me in this photo of our Vikette's initiation was my one-time best bud, Vicky. Vicky, who was very sweet and not even a little bit mean, didn't finish her tenure in Vikettes, either. She committed some minor infraction and was deemed unfit to exemplify the sterling character expected of Vikettes, so she was booted. I stopped being her friend after that.

Why?

Because I was a mean girl.

endless knot

Those happy-go-lucky Buddhists have a term, "Samsara." It means the endless cycle of rebirth and death. Or, in more casual usage, the general suffering of existence.

There's a fairly well-known Doctor's Opinion that states people like me tend to be "restless, irritable and discontent," until we find comfort and release after taking a few drinks. It works. For a while. Thereafter and for the rest of our lives, we chase after that sense of ease we once found, but it can never be recaptured. It's as elusive as the pot at the end of the rainbow.




This nifty little picture illustrates the cycle of craving, aggression and ignorance that make up the wheel of suffering that Buddhists would call, oh, you know, our typical daily life. Rooster, snake, pig. Repeat. That about sums it up.

This Christmas season, I'm thinking about samsara. I'm thinking about the ways I'm restless, irritable and discontent. And it all boils down to expectations. When I have expectations about how things are "supposed to" turn out or what people are supposed to do, I am locked into an either / or scenario. Either things will turn out the way I expect OR they won't. Either I will get what I want or I won't.

Looking back, more times than not, getting what I wanted didn't necessarily make me happy. Not getting what I wanted--or even worse, getting what I did NOT want--as it turned out, did not make me ultimately unhappy.

Things I thought were terrible at the time either turned out to be the best thing that could have happened, or at least set a train of events in motion that took me to a much better place.

Not only am I finding that I'm uniquely unqualified to issue self-appraisals (I think I'm walking on water when I'm really treading on thin ice and vice versa), I'm also not a very reliable judge of what is good for me, or what will really make me happy.

Still, I'm not content to just lurch through my pathetic existence like a zombie seeking warm brains to munch. I want more. I want to be liberated from the limitations of my own expectations.

I want to get back to the beginning. Beginner's mind. That place where things are new, and anything is possible because I haven't figured out yet that it is impossible. Potential. Possibility. Freedom.

I want to set myself and others free from my expectations. I want to give up the stupid certainty that I think I know what is best for you. A ridiculous idea, since often I don't even know what's best for me.

It turns out that the richest, most profound parts of my life have happened after and because my own little plans and designs fell apart. These days, I gravitate toward people whose life story could be told this way:

"The worst thing I could ever imagine happened. And then..."

My weird life

I am ordering take-out tofu noodles while texting a young woman I've never met. We are making an appointment to get together Friday night.

"Is 6:30 too early?"

I'm thinking I could meet her and still have time to make an 8 pm meeting of ex-problem drinkers like me.

"Yes," she texts back. "What's the latest you can do?"

"Oh. Ok. It doesn't matter."

"How about 9?" she suggests.

I'm thinking, won't you be too tired? Are you getting enough rest? But instead, I type,

"Can we make it a little later, 9:15?"

Because I'm also thinking I could still make it to that 8 pm meeting...

We make our plan to meet.

The young woman is the mother of my gestating grandchild. "Bump," I call him.

Bump's dad –Dad? Sperm donor? Or, as one of my friends called a young man in a similarly unplanned scenario, "the perpetrator" – is my son. And my son is in jail. And he got this young woman pregnant immediately before getting himself locked up.

"She's knocked up; he's locked up," my brain chirps at me.

My brain is not ready to address this situation dead-on. It tunes out. It makes pallid jokes. It fuzzes over.

He was sentenced to 3 years. After a routine traffic stop, he was found to be in violation of his probation. If he had met the terms of his probation for 5 years, his record would have been cleared of his felony conviction for burglary of a habitation. But he didn't. He will be a convicted felon forever.

He was on probation after 13 months of incarceration, the last 6 in a locked-down rehab.

When my son was himself a bump, I never dreamed he would grow up to be an addict and convicted felon. That he would run away and drop out and get arrested. That I would learn how to make bail to get him out of jail, then months later, change my locks to keep him out of my house.

He was a beautiful baby. Brimming over with life. Happy. Curious. Very intelligent. He got brown eyes from his daddy and the gene for alcoholism. From me, male-pattern baldness and the gene for alcoholism. A double dose of the demon gene.

I did everything worried parents do. I sent him to rehab. Went to the dreaded "Family Weekend" at the end of rehab. Hired shrinks and lawyers. Bought cars that he wrecked. After two, I vowed to buy no more cars. I paid tuition, hoping this time he would finish a semester. He didn't. As much as it breaks my heart, I will pay no more tuition.

Most of all, I hoped. Then I despaired. Then I hoped again. Then, I was slightly less crushed the next time. Then I hoped, maybe slightly less hopeful. Then, I was disappointed, but not crushed or despairing.

Finally, I grew numb.

I was advised not to expect "immediate, contented sobriety." In fact, stop expecting anything.

This advice came from people whose “kids” were now in their mid-40s, and who had been down this road for 29 years, not the 9 years I had.

In contrast to my near paralysis and zombie-like state, the baby's mama has handled herself and this situation with dignity. She has handled me with caution and respect. She texted me to see if I wanted progress reports on the baby. Did I want to know what the doctor said when she had her visits?

"Of course." I texted back.

"I just didn't know how you felt about the baby." She texted to me.

What difference does it make how I feel about it? It's here. You're having it. We deal with it.

"It's my grandbaby." I text back to her.

Watch out for the brown acid!

It is the 40th anniversary of Woodstock, and I just learned that the promoters of the music festival/happening/love-in were bummed the performer they really wanted to close out the event turned down their invite.

Do you know this one?

It was Roy Rogers.

What a different world this might have been if Roy Rogers had crooned "Happy Trails" at the end of Woodstock!

It might have healed the generational divide permanently. Or ushered in the "hat act" cross-over country western musical genre decades before Tim McGraw.

Watching documentary after documentary, listening to Amy Goodman hawk the commemorative Pacifica Radio Woodstock edition complete with Roger Daltry-inspired leather fringe cover, I have to wonder about the half-million folks who are now 40 years older.

They're all on Medicare now.

You know what we need is another Woodstock where those 500,000 60+-year-olds have a peaceful love-in for universal healthcare! The lack of affordable, decent healthcare for so many in a nation so wealthy is really harshing our mellow, man.

Just swap bran muffins for the pot brownies and you're all set.

The doctor is in

I was intrigued with an interview I saw on Bill Maher's program this evening--the President's personal physician is also a member of Physicians for a National Health Program http://www.pnhp.org/ There are 16,000 doctors in this country who WANT a single-payor system. It is Medicare for everybody. Now, I know there are still plenty of nitwits out there polluting the atmosphere with babblings like, "Tell the government to keep its hands off my Medicare!" But there's still hope. We just need to keep encouraging our electeds to press on and not let the loud and ignorant derail this movement. We also need to shine a very bright light on abuses like the CEO of Cigna's compensation ">"falling" to a mere $11 million last year, 50% off his $22 million paycheck in 2007. And we should hold up to shame and ridicule anyone who buys into Sarah Palin's phantom of an Obama death panel determining to put her baby to death, because Trig has Down's syndrome (seriously. and Newt Gingrich defends this reprehensible load of crap) what is more likely in danger of death is the $22 million paycheck for an insurance company CEO.

Dear Mr. President, keep pushing

I support your efforts to reform health care. Please keep pushing. And please avoid watering down reforms to the point of making them irrelevant.

A country rich enough to kill Taliban with drone missiles in Afghanistan can deliver breast cancer treatment to an unemployed administrative assistant in Texas! It is time for America to set its skewed priorities straight.

I believe the discourse around health care reform should be a conversation about the right of every American to a basic level of care. Denying health care is a denial of civil rights. We accept the right of every child to attend school. And we pay for her education, even if her parents are in the country illegally, because all Americans have a stake in equipping the next generation to be productive members of society. It is the next logical step to apply that sense of shared responsibility to health care.

And please keep repeating the fact that health-care costs have skyrocketed at the same time that real wages have stagnated. Even if people will not support reform because it is right, they will do it out of self-interest, when they know the facts.

Our current system discriminates against people who make too much to qualify for government care, but don't make enough to pay for the basics of wellness, like preventive check-ups and routine tests. For them, serious illness compounds physical and emotional crisis with a financial setback they may never escape. Multiplied millions of times, their illnesses are creating a financial hole the U.S. may never climb out of. And may God help the growing numbers of the unemployed. There is a stark line segregating the health care haves from the have nots.

This is not the America we should be.

As the health reform debate festers into an increasingly acrimonious and unhelpful mess, "Astroturf" organizations are disrupting town hall meetings and spewing misinformation. This disturbing perversion of the town hall process should cause thoughtful Americans to recoil in distaste. And to take action. That is why I am finally writing today, after having these sentiments for months.

But I am hopeful intimidation tactics will backfire. Perhaps by embarrassing moderate opponents, fake Americans for Prosperity will tip the balance toward reform. Fistfights at a Tampa town hall, hand-lettered signs scrawled with swastikas, and a Congressman hung in effigy, recall scenes of angry, axe-wielding white men screaming at a little black girl trying to enter a desegregated school. That was not the America we wanted to be then. I am hopeful America can rise to the occasion again. We are better than this.


My qualifications to write this essay: None, really. But I have seen a dear friend lose health insurance half-way though breast cancer treatment and before reconstructive surgery. This upper middle-class professional's company declared bankruptcy and cancelled its policy, leaving her to come up with $11,000 per treatment to continue chemo. If she couldn't find a new job soon enough, her cancer would be considered a pre-existing condition and not be covered by a new employer's policy. All this was perfectly legal.

Making McCain Exciting

My new favorite thing. The brilliant people at The Colbert Report took note of a recent John McCain speech in which the GOP chosen one not only was robotic, monotone and lifeless, but he ALSO was standing in front of a green screen. Thus, the "Make McCain Exciting Greenscreen Challenge" was born, and the floodgates opened. Some of these are so funny, they are awe-inspiring. Something the candidate himself was several decades ago, (not funny, but awe-inspiring). A long career in politics causes one to lose all awe-inspringness, though.

My favorites: Gray Ambition

Street Racer McCain


Bucktooth Bunny McCain

Star Trek McCain

Toto, I don't think McCain's in Kansas anymore

Putting kittens to sleep


And finally, this weird little Mini McCain



Ahhh...life is good, with a bit of computer enhancement.

Big Brains

So, I get spammed occasionally by a Speakers Bureau called "Big Speak." Since I'm a PR person, Big Speak assumes I'll book one of their people for a keynote at some gala or special meeting. Reasonable enough. Yesterday, I got a postcard from them that advertised "Big Business Minds" and the speakers, presumably, who had them.

What struck me about these Big Business Minds was there were 16 of them. But only one was female. I felt depressed.

I go to the Web site. OK. Buzz Aldrin. You can't argue with that. He's a legend. And Lance Armstrong. Same thing. I scroll down the page and find one female speaker and her topic is...menopause.

Have to take my wee little brain off to work now. Thank goodness we have such smart men running everything for us. Like the White House, Federal Reserve, EPA and the Pentagon.

Toodles.