My grandson is wearing a “Haley’s Comet” t-shirt that was my son’s back in 1985.
There was a time when I intended to make my son a quilt out of the images from his old t-shirts, and I saved a bunch of them in a box that has accompanied me on moves since the late 70s. These days, my grandson also wears a 30-years old t-shirt from the original Star Trek movie.
Sometimes intentions have their own intentions.
My 70th birthday is today. My Face Book profile photo today is one from the 70s as a reminder of the fleetingness of time and body image.
I am here trying to take care of my 94 year old mother , but I am feeling like the sciatica inflicted 70 year old that I am.
And I’m pissed because my laptop wont connect to the net even tho the wifi sig is coming in strong. So I’m doing this late at nite on my iphone because it’s my only time my hands are free of my mother’s ferocious grasp.
Let me tell you, those 70s were a hell of a lot more fun than this one.
But it’s my birthday so I’ll bitch if I want to. Hell, my first birthday card is my jury duty notice.
I am watching the evolution of the third generation of our family’s non-believers. He’s 7 years old now, asking questions like “if everyone has a mother, than shouldn’t the first mother have had a mother.” And so he learns about evolution.
He doesn’t ask about god or the first Christmas. He knows the stories. The various creation stories. The various winter celebration stories. He knows that different people believe different things when it comes to all things “god.”
He’s never been to an actual church service, although he might when my 94 year old Catholic mother finally passes away. He understands death as the final human event, and he participated in our ritual when we sent his grandfather’s ashes into the sea. He understands the power of ritual, apart from its religious associations.
What causes him to wonder, to experience awe, are the questions of science. What makes him feel secure are the roots of family. What sparks his creativity is the vitality of this planet’s various mythologies.
I brought up two compassionate, ethical, moral children (now adults) without a belief in in god. If they feel the awesomeness of the divine around them, it is through the natural world and their connection to it. And through their example and teaching, my grandson is sensing that divine as well.
Some people find comfort in faith. That’s OK. It’s just not us.
But we do find comfort in some cultural traditions. Christmas, for example.
It’s Christmas Eve.
For dinner tonight, we will have beet barszcz and three different kinds of pierogi. My daughter has kept part of the family’s Polish food tradition.
We will open family presents tonight in front of the lit Christmas tree, and Santa will come when we are all asleep and fill our stockings. For us it’s a cultural thing, not a religious. After all, stories of virgin births are a part of almost every cultural mythology.
We will set a place for the absent member of our family, way out in Portland, Oregon, who, we hope, will enjoy the box of gifts we sent out to him.
On Christmas Day, we will go to my son-in-law’s family to continue the feast.
Christmas, Xmas, Yule, Saturnalia, Solstice. We celebrate our family and hope for a future in which we all will thrive.
Merry Christmas.
Yes, I know that’s the name of a book by the Ya-Ya writer, Rebecca Wells.
But in this case, I’m referring to this slide show of “altars” that people submitted to a request for “What’s on Your Shelf” from the blog on Killing the Buddha.
I’m not sure how I found that site — probably just surfing around, looking for something to think about, care about. Not that there isn’t plenty out there: homeless, bankruptcy, greed, war, fraud, despair. Oh, yes, plenty to think about and care about. Too much, as a matter of fact. Too much for my tired brain, tired heart.
If You Meet the Buddha on the Road, Kill Him is one of my favorite non-fiction books. Maybe by only favorite non-fiction book. So, it’s not surprising that when I ran across the Killing the Buddha website, I was intrigued.
I used to have an altar of sorts — that’s when I had room for a surface to put it on. Now I have a wall
that includes a witch’s broom, my old power stick, a quilted shield especially designed and constructed for me by my good quilter friend, my new walking stick, Acuaba, and a photoshopped picture of “witches at tea” using the faces of my women friends. As powerful and meaningful as any shelved altar, I would think.
My shelves themselves are stacked with books, craft patterns, and assorted other things of significance. For example:
You might notice the Tarot deck, the icons, the empty box from my 3G iphone, a mini cast iron cauldron. What you don’t see in the shelves below are my collections of beads and jewelry findings that I’m trying to find time to play with/work on.
As I hurry along to get ready for Christmas (yes, I do still call it Christmas; why not?), I think about the cocoon in which I have wrapped myself during this time of world wide insanity to escape from the fundamentalists, the radical atheists, the war mongers and warring sufferers, indeed, the sufferers of all kinds.
I surround myself with resident family and Bully Hill Seasons wine and Chocolate Mint kisses, with quilting dreams and knitting crafts, with escapist suspense novels on ipod and paper, with the snores of my old and much loved cat.
I wish there were, indeed, little altars everywhere like mine — eclectic and inclusive and affirming.
I wish there were an altar somewhere on which if could feel prayers for my suffering mother would be answered.
I was tooling around the website of the campus of which I am an alumna because I will be going with a college friend to his 50th reunion next month. As I was looking through the list of events for the reunion weekend, I noticed that the college library was having an event for former staff of the college’s newspaper to celebrate the fact that the old paper copies of the publication have been digitized.
Wow, I think. I must be in those digits somewhere, having been the Feature Editor and having authored several different columns over my coed years.
So I go into the data base and poke around the issues from time period that I was on the paper’s staff.
It’s a whole lot embarrassing to read what I wrote as a college junior that pretty much always appeared on page 3. I pretentiously called my column “The Prism.”
Well, at least this isn’t so bad.
We didn’t have a journalism program back then, and I cringe at what today’s journalism students would think if they had some reason to read what I wrote when I was young and full of myself and still trying out my voice.
The writers’ workshop I joined starts in a couple of weeks.
Funny, but back then I probably didn’t think I needed to take one.
One of my brother’s college-days girlfriends is staying in my old living space here for a few days. They were out at the Woodstock “Roots of Woodstock” concert last night and are out somewhere this afternoon doing whatever she felt like doing during this her brief vacation.
When I went upstairs to get something out of the refrigerator that’s still there, I caught a scent of what must be her perfume. I liked it. It freshened up the whole area.
I haven’t worn perfume since I started wearing hairspray and the scents conflicted.
I remember finding the cologne I used to wear in my teens and twenties (maybe even 30s?) as making me feel light and airy — a feeling I wouldn’t mind having again.
You might remember that scent: Windsong. “I can’t seem to forget you. Your Windsong stays on my mind,” the commercial sang.
I don’t know about him, but it certainly stayed on my mind, and I’m having the desire to smell it again.
Maybe that’s because it smells a little sulphury around here due to the well water, which needs to be run through the softener — which can’t be done until my brother cleans out the residue and puts in more softening and deodorizing agent.
It just smelled so darn nice up there where my brother’s friend has hung up her clothes for a few days.
I have somewhat solved the cat litter box odor in my two-room personal quarters back home by strategically placing bags of zeolyte around the premises. But that doesn’t make the air smell “nice.”
I don’t like the strong scents of air fresheners, so I’ve just ordered a bottle of Windsong cologne to spray on my sheets and in my closet.
I wonder if it will smell the same to me as it did a half-century ago.
Not Bethel, where the original Woodstock festival was held, but rather the town of Woodstock, where the planning for the original festival took place and where, for decades, the town served as a magnet for the most talented artists and musicians..
That’s where my brother is tonight, to hear and rendezvous with his old pals from the original Blues Magoos, who are performing tonight at the Bearsville Theater.
Forty years ago, when the original Woodstock was happening, I was the mother of a 6 year old and 7 months pregnant with the son who has become theonetruebix. The Woodstock Festival was a far cry from my interests at the time.
Family lore has it that my cousins (then teenagers) all piled into a car to drive up to Woodstock Festival from where they lived in lower New York State. They never made it, having got stuck in the long line of cars heading for Bethel who never made it either.
I never missed missing Woodstock. I don’t miss missing the Roots of Woodstock concert tonight.
Tonight I am missing my home in Massachusetts and I will miss going to the beach with everyone there tomorrow.
It was 1953. I was thirteen and feeling my burgeoning hormones. I would tell my folks that I was going to confession and, instead, meet my friends at a soda shop with a juke box, located a few blocks away, where the owner let us get together in a back room. We closed the door and played “spin the bottle.” That was where I got my first kiss from a boy — to the music of Les Paul and Mary Ford.
Mary Ford passed away in 1977, and by then I was listening to the Moody Blues and Judy Collins. Mary Ford and Les Paul were divorced long before then. I don’t remember hearing anything about her passing, but
Les Paul died today.
Moody Blues and Judy Collins. Here no longer young, but, like Les Paul did until age 94, they can still move an audience.
This is the third Mother’s Day that I’m blogging this post. After all, my kids are the reason I’m a mother, right?
Some women take to mothering naturally. I had to work at it. And so I wasn’t the best mother in the world. I would have worked outside the home whether I had become a single mom or not. And because I did, mine were latchkey kids, with my daughter, beginning at age 12, taking care of her younger brother, age 5, after school. I left them some evenings to go out on dates. Oh, I did cook them healthy meals, and even cookies sometimes. I made their Halloween costumes and went to all parent events at their schools. My daughter took ballet lessons, belonged to 4H (but I got kicked out as Assistant Leader because I wouldn’t salute the flag during the Vietnam War). I made my son a Dr. Who scarf and took him to Dr. Who fan events. I bought him lots of comic books, invited friends over to play, and taught him how to throw a ball.
But most of all, I think/hope I did for them what my mother was never able to do for me, — give them the freedom and encouragement to become who they wanted to be — to explore, make mistakes, and search for their bliss. I think/hope that I always let them know that, as far as I was concerned, I loved them just the way they were/are.
Not having had that affirmation from my mother still affects my relationship with her. I hope that my doing that right for them neutralizes all the wrong things I did as they were growing up.
So, you two (now adult) kids, here’s to you both. You keep me thinking, you keep me informed, you keep me honest, and, in many ways, you keep me vital. I’m so glad that I’m your mother.
So, in memory of those not-always-good ol’ days that you two somehow managed to survive with style, here you are, playing “air guitar and drums” — enjoying each other’s company sometime in the late 70s and bringing so much delight into my life.
We are all remembering that it was a year ago today. I see people smoking and I want to tell them. I want to tell them that they should have been there to see where it leads, what it leaves behind in those who feel his absence as much as they felt his presence.
I took a Valium this morning before my spinal MRI. I am still relaxed in reverie.
April is such a neither month — not yet really spring, still capable of the few flurries I spotted yesterday on my way from the mountains to the valley.
A wedding in April is a weather-chancy thing. My cousin’s daughter’s this past weekend took place in a venue that featured a panoramic view of the Hudson River and the foothills of the Catskills. If it had been a sunny day, the view would have been breathtaking.
The cousins of my generation sat together, recognizing that we were now the “elders” of the family, as our younger relatives stopped by every once in a while to chat with us. On that dreary April evening, the music and dancing and revelry reminded us that warmer vistas are just beyond sight. Youth and hope and love ruled for those several hours as a muted sun slipped behind the hilltops.
One of my cousins, who married into a family that, for generations, maintained a 24 room house in what is a nicer part of the city, hosted some of us from out of town. The house is theirs now, her and her husband, who spend part of the year in Florida. It’s a house filled with generations of ghosts, all of those who lived and died here, family and extended family. For generations. They might sell it if they could; but who wants a 24 room house in a one-family residential neighborhood. For now, it works as a home-base for a number of the clan, including their daughter and future son-in-law.
My cousins and I, for the most part, are very different — at least our lives meandered down different paths, mine having taken me a long way to the left. But they are tolerant of my politics, my lack of religion. They are probably more tolerant of my viewpoints than I am of theirs. They are able to interact and relate with me and with each other in ways that ignore all of those values that might divide us.
As we sit around the breakfast table over the kinds of food we all seem to like (little things, like corn toasties — which we don’t like to toast — and Polaner All-fruit instead of sugar-ridden jelly or jam) they make me laugh. They do not pressure, they do not manipulate. Together, we are the kids we were who grew up playing “Flies Up” on their front stoop, even through dismal April afternoons.
We relax into the neither-nor of April, a time of its own, of our own.
There is another family wedding coming in June. I will be there again, in the bosom of family.
Closer by, my mom slips inevitably into dementia’s final horror. I stopped her from eating a paper plate the other day. I strain to remember the Polish I used to speak so fluently so that I can understand her.
I am not there now, I am home in Massachusetts, but I will be going to visit her in a few days to help set up space for, and help to acclimate, a live-in helper who speaks Polish.
Perhaps I should take my Valium with me. After all, it will still be April.