To Everything, There is a Season...

I woke up this morning with this song in my head:  "Turn, Turn, Turn".  

The Byrds, a 1960s California folk rock band, made the most well-known version of Pete Seeger's adaptation from The Book of Ecclesiastes.  It was taken almost word-for-word from the Bible, except for the last line:  "A time for peace, I swear it's not too late." 

I had the record in what we used to call "single" form, just two songs on either side of a small disc, which is selling today on eBay for $39.99.  When I bought it, it put me back all of 49¢.  

It's worth noting, although not really germane, that the song was released on my birthday, October 1, 1965, the day I turned twelve.

What has struck me this morning is how those lyrics have followed me since I was twelve – especially these, taken somewhat out of order:

To everything there is a season…

A time to be born, a time to die…

A time to build up, a time to break down…

A time to dance, a time to mourn….

A time to cast away stones, a time to gather stones together.

When I first heard it, the song was about world peace, as it was intended.  In my twenties and thirties it was truly about dancing and gathering experience, people, travels and money, and then casting some away and gathering more.  In my forties, I had a fair bit of mourning, of building up and breaking down. 

Hoping this won’t sound morbid or depressing (as it is most definitely NOT depressing to me), I can see that now, as I near sixty years old, my eye strays to “a time to be born, a time to die…”

I was raised in a generally non-religious way, for which I’m grateful – but I was given a very solid foundation by my grandmother and my mother of what comes after this life.  I won’t spell it out in full here, but to my mind, the best description appeared in Richard Bach’s “Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah.”  

Put simply, Bach says that life is like a movie.  We buy the ticket, go inside the theater, and suspend our disbelief for a while.  We become a part of the action, and get caught up.  We laugh, we cry, and hopefully, we learn something about ourselves and others.  Then the lights come on, we stand up, and we walk back out to our “real” life.

Many people think of this as our real life, and of what comes after as a sort of amorphous, cloudy, sometimes scary, sometimes comforting place.  I think of it as going home, and the peace in that is indescribable.

That’s not to say that I’m expecting to go there anytime soon, although when the times get hard, I think of it with just a smidge of longing.  But I don’t think I’ve ever walked out of a movie, no matter how bad it was.  I’m certainly not starting now, especially as I’ve managed to sit through this much of it, and there’s so much still to look forward to.

But I talked yesterday, as I do every Saturday, with my mother, who will be 91 in August.  She’s very aware that her movie is nearing the end, and if I may stretch the metaphor, she’s gathering up her things, and preparing to stand and leave the theater.  I suppose you could say that the credits are rolling.

She has so much to be proud of -- a life well-lived and well-loved, and happiness given to so many people.  But the vast majority of her contemporaries have packed up and gone home, and she’s buried two husbands and a son.  She’s tired, and wondering what use she is to anyone.  She spends more time remembering than she does looking forward, and the people she longs to talk to are no longer here.

So yesterday, without tears, and hopefully without selfishness, I began to wish her well on her journey.  I quoted, or possibly misquoted, the Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, where Rinpoche says: “Die a little every day, and it won’t be such a shock.” (If I’m wrong about that quote, please don’t tell me, because I love it.)  Mom laughed at that, and said, “Honey, I’ve got that one covered…”

To everything, there is a season.  My movie is just a little longer than hers, but I’ll pack up and go home too, and she’ll be waiting there for me.  Probably with a pot roast simmering in the oven. 

Now that’s something to look forward to.

~~~~~

A Mixed Marriage

My husband and I, after fifteen primarily blissful years together, have suddenly found ourselves on either side of the Great Decision of the age:  Twitter or Facebook.

Yes, I know, there are legions of people who manage to straddle the line and do both, but I’m sort of an “all or nothing” person, and with only so much disposable time at hand, I found I had to make a firm decision.  Twitter won out. 

And so, one night, with the compassionate support of a good friend on MSN I managed to “unfriend” or ignore all those who had requested the pleasure of my company, and I shut down my Facebook account.  It required a rather largish glass of wine for courage, but afterwards, I’ll admit I slept like a baby.

Please remember that I’m the type of person who has to turn out all the lights in the house when I run out of Halloween candy -– guiltily flinching in the dark as the laughing voices, in Doppler fashion, move toward the front door and away.  When the FedEx man comes to the door and I don’t want to stop writing (or even comb my hair), I sort of hold my breath, not wanting to hurt his feelings, until I hear the package drop on the front stoop, and the truck gears up and drives down the street.

The process on Facebook was simply too difficult for me.  I’m aware this is a failing of mine, not of the 250 million other people in this big world of ours whose days begin and end with it.  I’ve been told I took it all much too seriously –- which I’m certain is true. 

When I got a birthday wish from a friend of a cousin of an acquaintance, I felt I had to answer it with, at the very least, a short thank you.  I’m not inordinately popular, but when you multiply that by thirty or more, there goes my birthday wish of a day of peace, writing at my computer.  When a newborn’s picture is posted, aren’t we required, as members of the human race, to send a message back saying the baby is adorable?  And now that I know about said child, is a gift expected?

I’m sure if I asked these questions of the internet, I’d get 250 million answers –- most giving me the one my friends gave me:  “If you don’t want to answer, then don’t.”  But there I was again in the back bedroom, hiding from the laughing children dressed as Hello Kitty and Harry Potter, wishing I’d bought more candy. 

So, the final exercise of rejecting my nephew’s best friend, or ignoring a person I went to junior high school with and haven’t spoken to in 25 years, or of not answering a note put on my wall by a dear friend of my late brother Kim –- required an actual, human friend online giving me permission, and the glass of wine referred to earlier.  Once it was done, I vowed never again to open the silly thing.

Enter my wonderful, practical, not-always-good-at-staying-in-touch husband.  I’ve been on Twitter since February of 2009, and have tried in vain to get him hooked.  Suddenly, he announces that he’s starting a Facebook account, and my reaction surprises me so much, I actually laugh out loud.  He may as well have told me he’s embarking on an affair.

But, as usual, he’s right about this being the perfect forum for his way of staying in touch.  He can post his ongoing study of sunsets, which he loves to photograph, so that instead of just describing them to his mother, he can say, “go to my Facebook page and look.”  He can, as he did yesterday, share the joy of an exciting San Francisco 49er’s win with friends from work.   A old girlfriend from high school posts pictures of her husband and children, and he smiles while he sips his coffee, telling me long-ago stories.

So I suppose, in a way, we have the best of both worlds.  I scroll happily through my timeline on Twitter, reading tips on writing to him, sharing useless but endlessly interesting trivia, telling him news of friends from the UK and Paris, or what @StephenFry or @WilliamShatner are up to, and reading bits of blogs from around the world. 

He, in turn, lets his family know that I’m still alive, but no, I’m not on Facebook any more.

The perfect mixed marriage.

~~~~~

Home for Christmas

My son is home for Christmas.

I almost said “my boy is home” but pulled myself up short.  At 28, 6’5”, and as self-sufficient as a man can be, my son is no longer a boy.  Since the beginning of time that law of nature has been tugging at the hearts of mothers, while simultaneously engendering a sense of pride that often requires a quick intake of breath.

Right now, he sleeps a floor below me, in the bedroom that will always be his, as promised.  It’s one of the things I’m making right from the last generation to this one – my bedroom disappeared when I drove away to college, but for as long as he wants it, and probably beyond that, he will have a bedroom wherever I live.

Someday he may sleep in that room with a person he hopes to spend the rest of his life with, perhaps grandchildren will snuggle into the matched pair of single four-posters in the other downstairs bedroom – but for now, he walks seriously and singly through life, studying, planning, laughing, training, thinking.

There’s that intake of breath again.  Have I mentioned that I’m very proud of him?

For now, he sleeps and dreams downstairs, of things I probably can’t imagine, surrounded by photos of his childhood, the tassel from his graduation cap, the book of Calvin and Hobbes cartoons we read together and giggled over for so many years, the old calendar with spectacular panoramas of great golf courses which never goes out of date, the picture on the wall of the scoreboard at a San Francisco Giants baseball game wishing him a happy 15^th birthday, the soft bear he named Booey when he was two – the one with the space where the nose used to be, because he very simply loved it away.

Many of those days were a blur for him, the speeding train of growing up.  For me, they stand out in bas relief, a fresco that I can walk along and remember so clearly, not only what happened, but how I felt about it.

I’ll spend the next five days drinking him in, before he flies off again to his good and productive life.  My mother, who loves him as I do, likes to say that she just enjoys sitting and “watching his hair grow.”  She does it overtly and dramatically, making him blush – I’m more of the furtive type, but I love him no less.

This is my best gift.  My son, my boy, is home for Christmas.  

My two favorite men -- Thomas and Robert

☆*♥☆♥*☆

Giving Thanks

While I was away at college, my stepmother threw away everything I owned, except what I had in my dorm room.  It’s too easy to say it was a wicked thing for a stepmother to do…she was a person who was in a lot of pain, and I’ve told myself many times since that day that if those things were important, I should have taken better care to have them with me.

But “those things” were signed yearbooks, school essays, childhood journals, letters from friends, birthday cards, scrawled poetry, my earliest writings…and it actually gives me a soft ache in my chest just thinking about them.  Perhaps if I still had them, they wouldn’t seem so precious, but I doubt it.

A strange topic for Thanksgiving, but I’ll get to the point. 

I think that losses bring home the importance of things, in a visceral way, a way that sticks.  The thought of losing something is nothing like actually losing it.

So, when a box arrived on my doorstep fairly recently from my stepfather, I took notice.  It was the sum total of my 90-year-old mother’s family history.  Photographs, scrapbooks, notes in fading sepia ink…but the great treasure was two journals, one from each of my grandmothers -- Ethel’s from Evanston, Illinois in 1901, and Bula’s from Fort Dodge, Kansas in 1904.

Grandma Ethel’s is truly disappearing before my eyes, with small pieces of cracked and powdered red leather littering my desk each time I open it to transcribe, but I’m saving it, page by page, on my computer.  Grandma Bula’s holds up better -- I’m saving it, too, by typing the words into a document that goes on the external hard drive for safekeeping.

Ethel and Bula couldn’t possibly have conceived how much their words would mean to a granddaughter who was 9 and 17, respectively, when they died.  Computers and hard drives would be a mystery to the young girls who rode out to “socials” in a horse and buggy, and wondered whether to wear the blue frock with the satin ribbons, or the white shirtwaist with the red stitching.

But those girls had hard lives…expected to begin earning their way at fourteen, be married a few years later, manage a house, raise children, care for their husbands, and somehow keep their dreams alive.  I can read it in every page, and I’m so grateful for their point of view.

They’ve given me back my history.  And to the ache in my chest about my lost writings? They would say, “Feel it.  Move on.  Write some more.”

~~~~~

The Truth

My claim: Everything that follows here is the truth. 

My disclaimer: The truth may matter a bit too much to me, but there you have it.

~~~~~~

This is a story I’ve been told by my mother for as far back as I can remember.  I don’t remember the actual event, but she told me the story so many times, it felt as if I remembered it.

When I was three, my mother, my brothers and I were invited to an audience with the Queen of England. This is not as far-fetched as it may seem, because when I was three in 1956, my mother was one of the most recognized women in the world.

I was a beautiful little girl, dressed just like a princess, in a blue satin dress with white eyelet lace, full petticoats, and blue satin ribbons in my blonde curls. In my mind, as she told the story, I thought of a tiny Cinderella at the Ball.

I was so pretty, in fact, that I just couldn’t resist seeing again how pretty I was. So, as she turned away to do something for the boys, I climbed up and peeked into the huge fountain outside Buckingham Palace. I leaned over to see better, and plop! I fell in the fountain, pretty satin dress, petticoats and all.

The punch line (and there was always a punch line with my mother’s stories) was that I met the Queen of England in a towel.

~~~~~~

I would say, “Really? Did that really happen? Really truly?”  Mom would pull back and give me that look, as if to say, How could you doubt me?  Then she would answer, “Absolutely, positively the truth. You met the Queen in a towel.”

Now, I know most children are told stories by their parents, some true, and some not. But I had spent so little time with my mother that her stories took on a kind of mythic importance in my mind. As I grew up, this story somehow became a drumbeat in my life. 

It was simultaneously very otherworldly (how many American children get to meet the Queen?), and very real (I did, after all, fall in the fountain). It was funny, and possible, and a connection to my mother that became inordinately important. I was special, I was a princess, and even though my mother didn’t tuck me in every night like other mothers, I had the compensation of knowing that this unique thing had happened to me.

And the truth of it, through so many years of telling and retelling, so many times of me asking her, and so many times of her laughing off the asking, was never in question for me.

When I was thirty-five, and my son was six, I was putting him to bed one night. He loved me to tell him stories before bed. Made up stories, real stories, things we had done together. I always told him when the stories were real and when they were made up. I told him the story of Mommy falling in the fountain in front of Buckingham Palace again, and once more, he said, “Really? Did that really happen?” and I said…”Absolutely…

Suddenly, I got a cold feeling in the pit of my stomach, and I stopped. I held him closer, and said, “I don’t know if it’s true. I need to ask your grandmother.”  

Truth was very important between my son and me. I had never knowingly told him a lie…trying always to give him the reasons behind the half-truths and white lies that become a necessary evil in polite society.  

My mother, on the other hand, used to say that she got bored with her stories, and tried to vary the endings to keep herself interested. I, at twelve, or thirteen, or fourteen, always the stodgy one, would say, “But what you were just talking about really happened, how can you vary the ending?”  Which would usually be met by a good-natured laugh, and, “Oh, Susie, you’re a piece of work!”

She’d told me stories all my life, why was I so sure this was the truth? But now, it involved my boy, and stodgy me wanted to know. To really know.

The next time we drove down to Mom’s, I took her aside. “I need to talk to you about something serious.”

“OK, what?”

“Did I really fall into Buckingham Palace when I went to meet the Queen?”

Her laughter was immediate…the laugh that she always saved for my most serious moments. It was a laugh like a bell, that made her face even prettier than usual. It was a laugh that had gotten her through many a tough interview, and I’m sure many a fight with the men in her life. It always made me feel silly, and usually made me back off. Not this time.

“Is it true? That’s all I want to know.”

“Of course it’s true. I’ve always told you it’s true. What’s this all about?” And on the heels of that question, which never was a question at all, but was the end of the discussion, she turned and walked away.

I hounded her all weekend. She thought I was insane, and said so. If I’d been outside of myself, looking in, I might have agreed with her. I was relentless. Finally, in frustration, she threw her hands up, very angry, and said, “FINE! You want the truth, I’ll give you the truth.” Her tone said I’d be sorry I asked.

“When you were three, we went to England. I was invited to a party by Princess Margaret. You spilled some chocolate milk on your dress, so we had to go into the bathroom to clean it. You met Princess Margaret with a wet spot on your dress.” 

She stood, legs apart, defiant, a look on her face that was somewhere between triumph and hatred. Her look said clearly Are you happy? Is the truth so wonderful? What have you accomplished here?

I blinked, and I think my mouth was slightly open. It was such a little thing, I thought, this little lie, this little death of a story. But somewhere inside me, my past was melting away. All the stories in magazines about our perfect life, juxtaposed with the fights that raged in the master bedroom when the cameras stopped. 

I knew in that moment that if I was determined to know the truth from my mother, I would only find it like this…with anger, hatred, defiance, and her sure knowledge that a good story was better than the truth any day.

And one of the things that has always made me a mystery to her is that I'd rather have the truth. I'm a romantic, an idealist, and have even been called Pollyanna more than once. But yes, I'd rather have the truth.

Then I take a deep breath. And on the heels of the harsh judgment that rings so clearly in the words I’ve written here, I add a tempered point of view.  One that comes with age and experience and the understanding that the world isn’t painted in bold black and white brushstrokes.  It’s gray, and detailed, and limitless in its exceptions to the rules.

The land of make-believe was, in fact, the world my mother lived in. Her life was made up of stories, and literally, “made-up stories.”  And although I’d like the truth to be concrete, immutable, unflinching…it wasn’t wrong of her to tell me that story.  In fact, her truth was that I fell in the fountain at Buckingham Palace on my way to meet the Queen. 

Another deep breath. Ah, hell, who am I to shatter illusions?  We all get through our days here as best we can.

I have the truth now. I’ll just keep it to myself. 

~~~~~~

Kimball

NIGHT WATCHING 

  

My brother nearly lost his life 

One rainy Halloween when I was twelve.

My memories fragment

Forming a collage of desperate whispers

Waiting room vigils

And a bloody watch suspended in time.

Big brothers don’t die at sixteen

They grow old and fat and bald

To provide babies for an aunt’s knee.

The prospect of death

Took these sweet imaginary children too.

So at twelve, I mourned our future

And waited, in pure white and confusion.

We cursed the machine and prayed for the doctors.

It worked.

The machine was left mangled in the October rain.

And my brother is nearing thirty.

2/18/80

 ~~~~~~

The accident happened on the day before his sixteenth birthday.

My brother Kimball neared thirty, and indeed, passed it. But he went on to live out fifty-seven years of what anyone would call a complex life. If there was a straight path from point A to point B, Kim would wind through the alphabet in haphazard fashion, standing, falling, sometimes sleepwalking, gaining and losing people along the way. He could be infuriating, adorable, hurtful, and he could be so loving that it would nearly break my heart with its sweetness.

The motorcycle accident left him with two shattered legs, and the forty-two years that followed were filled with operations, crutches, wheelchairs, braces and countless pins and plates to hold his bones together. With one leg shorter than the other, he limped for the remainder of his life, and the resulting pressure of his 6'9" body on his hips and ankles put him in ongoing pain. 

The pain led to alcohol and drugs, and recovery, and relapse, and finally, in his forties…a full recovery that gave him a sense of himself, and peace.  When he felt it slipping, he would go down to the jails and spend nights in the detox units, helping others through those impossibly desolate first nights of getting clean. And he would remember. There but for the Grace of God go I…

And then, just as he may have been taking a breather…his thinking started getting fuzzy. He couldn't seem to find the right words. He forgot how to get places he'd been hundreds of times before. But he remembered how to get to the hospital, so he took himself there. He didn't know it, of course, but he would never drive his car away from that parking space.

The tumor on his brain was aggressive…it needed only from late January to early May to take him from us.

Kimball made me laugh more than anyone else ever could, and looked at the world with a deliciously warped sense of humor and an attitude filled with grace. From the time the kids were little, up until the very last time we were all together, when “Unca Kim” came to visit, we would eat, swim, play poker, and laugh. And laugh. And then laugh some more. Kim could make those kids giggle to distraction. I asked them once why they loved their uncle so much, and one of them said, “Unca Kim is like Disneyland!” I didn’t even need to ask what that meant.

Kim was my big brother in every way. Big. All nearly 7 feet of him. I have so many memories as a young girl of him standing over me, exaggerating that booming voice of his, trying to scare me into doing something he wanted me to do. But I learned the truth quickly…he was the gentlest of giants, a man of endless love and great compassion, with a soft spot for his little sister. When I was being bullied, he was the first one to come to my defense.

Kim and I shared the unique experience of being children of a famous person. We grew up in a spotlight, with magazine articles that talked about the perfect life we were leading…while we, in the reality of it, spent more time with our nannies than with our parents as their marriage unraveled. I was the only girl, which came with its own set of challenges…but Kim was the middle child, and I sometimes wondered if, for all his size, he felt he simply disappeared. 

But in the end, he turned out to be the most creative of us all. While in the hospital for nineteen long months as his legs struggled to recover from the Halloween night accident, he taught himself guitar, and to read music. Soon, the piano followed, then the flute, and then a myriad of instruments that he could layer one atop the other in the recording studio, before adding his smooth baritone, singing words that grew painfully from his growing understanding of a transient world.

So, although that “middle child syndrome” might have made him the weakest of the three of us, he was in fact, the strongest. When I think of him choosing the chart for this life, it occurs to me that he might have been a bit less ambitious: “I’ll be the middle son of an American icon, have an accident at fifteen that cripples my legs for life, acquire an addiction to drugs and alcohol, and on top of it, have to bend down for every doorway I pass through.” 

Kimball passed with flying colors. And now, he’s quite literally flying.  No limp, no pain, no struggles.

As an added gift, Kim gave me a roadmap about how to face death with bravery, honesty, and humor. His last three months will inspire me every day until I go to meet him. I sat with him as he toggled, sometimes in thirty second increments, from grief, to pain, to flirting with the nurses, to long, profound and deeply loving searching of my eyes, then to dancing with head and shoulders as his cell phone rang, then to a string of profanity that was positively Shakespearean in its beauty and variety, then sleep. Through it all, he was fully present, not wishing to let the morphine that was readily available dull the moments he had left here.

One day, as I was feeling very far away and sad about Kim, I talked with a friend who had just visited him, and asked, in very somber tones, “How’s he doing?” The friend laughed and said he had just left Kim, with five gorgeous women in his hospital room, sitting on his bed, giving him massages. And as I laughed too, I thought, “Kim is a lover. A lover of life, a lover of women, a lover of food, a lover of laughter.” He loved all the good things this life has to offer, and faced the bad things with courage. I can hope to be like him.

When I finally finish my work here, and cross over to the other side, I expect to see him standing there with arms open, saying, “Soooooozie!” ready to scoop me up off the ground in a huge, warm Kimball hug. 

Until then, I live my life fully, as he did. 

‘Night, Kimmie…your little sis loves you…

~~~~~