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The Rose

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I think I have a pretty active dream life.  I usually remember something of my sleeping hours upon awakening.  Perhaps that indicates the level of my anxieties and neuroses; I’m not sure.  Steve says he hardly ever dreams, and he thinks it’s because he is so aware of his conscious mind while he’s awake.  Well, fine for you, then.  I blink my eyes open and forget where I am.  I need decompression time every morning.  My dreams almost always include my late husband, who has been dead almost 4 years.  It gives me a rather fluid sense of reality.  Jim is real and Steve is real, they’re just never real at the same time, in the same place.  Is that weird?  Oh, probably.  I’m getting used to it.

The other thing I do in dreamland is sing.  I wake up singing a song, or with a song stuck in my head.  This morning, it was “The Rose”, a song Bette Midler recorded some years back.  I think I learned it from one of my kid’s elementary school music programs. The line I was stuck on went like this: “Some say love, it is a river, that drowns the tender reed.  Some say love, it is a razor, that leaves your soul to bleed.  Some say love, it is a hunger, an endless aching need.  I say love, it is a flower, and you, its only seed.”

Now why in the world would something like that be dominating my waking transition?  I thought about that for a while.  Then I began to cry.  This is how I know when I’ve hit on some repressed emotion, some way that I think about myself that I don’t like to admit.  For some reason, I was associating with that tender reed, drowned in a river of love.  I was 15 when I met my husband, 21 when we married, 45 when I was widowed.  My youth was engulfed in loving him.  I don’t feel a great resonance with the bleeding soul bit.  Ah, but the hunger, the aching need; yeah, that gets to me, too.  I feel that for my kids as well.  I call it “yearning”.  I yearn for my kids all the time, no matter where they are.  It’s a visceral thing.  I once learned in a Bible study that there is a Hebrew word for God’s loving-kindness that translates to a verb form of the same word that’s used for a mother’s womb.  Womb-love.  God “wombs” us.  I “womb” my kids.  I also “womb” my dead husband.

Now the last line of that first verse, I will take exception to.  “You, its only seed” just sounds too exclusive and attached.  It doesn’t fit the scope of the rest of the song, either, in my opinion.  Second verse: “It’s the heart afraid of breaking that never learns to dance; and it’s the dream afraid of waking that never takes a chance.  It’s the one who won’t be broken, who cannot learn to give; and the soul afraid of dying who never learns to live.”  Okay, you could probably guess that verse gets to me all over (see yesterday’s post).  Although, in my case, it’s the heart that once danced, the dream that once dared, the one who gave everything already who is afraid to live again and invest all that…again.  So, here’s the key change and the big finish: “When the night has been too lonely and the road has been too long, and you think that love is only for the lucky and the strong, just remember in the winter, far beneath the bitter snows, lies the seed that with the sun’s love, in the spring becomes the rose.”   At this point, I want to give credit to Amanda McBroom who wrote these lyrics.  Good job.  I love the idea of seeds beneath the snow.  It appeals to the naturalist in me, even though we STILL don’t have any snow this winter in Wisconsin.  I love the idea of hope and new life.  And this is where I get to re-write that last line in the first verse.  The seed of love isn’t a person.  It’s LIFE, life itself.

Steve and I were talking about this yesterday as we drove out to hike the Ice Age trail.  He was urging me, again, to talk about what I want in life, how I want to live, why I want the things I might want.  “Why do you want to have land and grow food?”  I want to nurture living things; I loved raising kids.  I loved because they lived.  I want to live life loving.  Whatever I do.  It’s a cyclical thing, the flower that comes from a seed and begets more seeds that become more flowers.  Life begets love which nourishes life…and so on.  Okay, maybe this is sounding like drivel to you.  There is something going on here, though, and it’s about a flow of energy passing from living thing to living thing, and some of us call it love.  I don’t like the idea of that energy being confined to one “beloved”.  That’s where I think I’m getting stuck.  I say love, it is a flower and all of life can be its seed.

There.  Sorry Amanda, but I have re-worked your song so that it fits my dreaming and waking life a little better.  Hope you don’t mind.

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The Power of Concepts

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Steve and I have been talking about concepts lately.  We humans think conceptually, like it or not.  Words, thoughts, concepts and the associations they suggest invariably bring with them emotional reactions and suffering.  Trying to leave concepts behind, or to do without them somehow, is what “enlightenment” points to…I think.  Maybe it’s not so much trying to eradicate them as it is to acknowledge their fabrication and refrain from investing them with a lot of meaning or credence.

The most troubling concept for me is death or mortality.  I have huge emotional associations with that concept that do tend to exert a lot of influence on me.  And yes, this causes suffering.  I suppose I can say that I come by this honestly, having had both my sister and my husband die at my side during my lifetime.  Consequently, I often feel the weight of a burden hanging around my head and shoulders, casting a shadow over my footsteps, causing me to be slow and rather plodding instead of eager and light on my feet.  You might call this a certain level of pervasive depression.  I find that, as I get older, I am more circumspect, less enthusiastic, and can easily convince myself out of an adventure.  I can never dismiss the danger of death with a casual “Oh, that’ll never happen to me!”  Instead, I tend to think: Why bother?  What’s the point?  Why start anything now, with the end so near in sight?  That kind of thing.

Let me direct your attention to Exhibit A:  Stephen Hawking.

As many of you know, Dr. Hawking celebrated his 70th birthday today.  When he was 21, and shortly before his first marriage, he was diagnosed with ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease) and told that his life expectancy was about 2-3 years.  “Why start anything now?” was a question that occupied his thoughts to some extent as he wrestled with the idea of starting his doctorate.  Wikipedia reports that the turning point came with his marriage. “When his wife, Jane, was asked why she decided to marry a man with a three-year life expectancy, she responded, ‘Those were the days of atomic gloom and doom, so we all had a rather short life expectancy.”‘

We all still have a rather short life expectancy.  None of us has a guarantee on the next minute.  What do you do with that concept?  “Refrain from investing (it) with a lot of meaning or credence.”  What do you invest in?  Your passion.  Your bliss.  That’s what Stephen Hawking did.  The speech he would have delivered today in person included this admonition: “Remember to look up at the stars, not down at your feet. Try to make sense of what you see and wonder about what makes the universe exist. Be curious.”

I took a walk along the Ice Age Trail at dusk.  Driving home, I asked Steve to pull over at a cornfield so that I could look up.  Here’s what I saw:

And this is just with my own myopic vision through some vari-focal glasses and a point and shoot digital camera.  I am curious about my experiences.  I am curious about how I think about them.  In the end, though, I think I want to concentrate mostly on being aware of being alive.

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Bridal Wave of Memories

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On this day 28 years ago, I was married to my high school sweetheart in my parents’ church in northern California.  I was 21 years old.  Jim was 23.  I wore the veil that my mother and grandmother wore on their wedding days.  I wore the hoop petticoat that my mother wore in 1955 under her similarly long-sleeved and high-colored wedding gown.  I also wore the wedding present Jim had given me a year before: a beautiful cameo pin that he had purchased on the Ponte Vecchio in Firenze.  My dress had been made by a local seamstress using pattern ideas, material and trim that my mother and I had picked out.  My mother and I selected the caterer, the photographer, and the florist together.  My mother secured the musicians: a flute player she knew to play in the church with our organist, and a jazz trio to play at the reception.  My parents issued the Banns of Marriage in the bulletin of the mass the week before my wedding, inviting everyone in the parish to attend.  The reception was held in the Parish Hall behind the church.

My bridesmaids included my two older sisters and two friends.  Jim’s groomsmen included his half-brother, my brother, and two friends.  We selected other friends to participate in reading the Scriptures.  Since we knew so many semi-professional singers personally, we decided not to have any soloists.  Instead, we included congregation hymns that we could all sing together.  The whole affair was pretty simple, but elegant, and definitely traditional.  I did not have a manicure or pedicure, I did my own hair and make-up, we did not have a DJ or MC or dancing.  I did throw my bouquet, but I gave my garter to my husband…to keep.  We did have lots of champagne and loaded the unopened bottles into the station wagon (nothing like a limo) when we took off afterwards for our honeymoon, driving back down to Southern California where I would continue the second semester of my senior year at college.

My grandmother was appalled that Jim and I arranged to meet each other the morning of our wedding day to drive out to a county arboretum and spend some time together.  She kept insisting that it was bad luck for the bride to see her future husband before joining him at the altar on her wedding day.  She also kept asking if someone was going to sing “I Love You Truly” at the service.  These were not the traditions that we were interested in honoring, though.  We were not about superstition or sentimentalism, or so we thought.  We wanted to be sacramental and sincere.  I suppose there are slippery slopes and fine lines involved in those distinctions.  What I do remember thinking about is how to conceptualize a lifetime together.  I figured that might be 50 years or more.  I could barely conceptualize the two decades I had actually experienced.  I realized that it had to come down to faith.  I couldn’t imagine or predict what our marriage would be like.  I could only promise  to live it moment by moment as lovingly as I could “until we are parted by death”.  I did that to the best of my ability, I believe.  That parting occurred almost four years ago, now.

January is often a month of looking into the future, making uncertain plans, vowing to try to live in particular ways.  “Pointing your canoe”, as we like to put it.  Don’t let it frighten you.  Paddling is slow work, with plenty of time to correct, re-align, look around, and get inspired.  You can even drift for a while, if you like, without causing harm.  Forgiveness can arise.  Consequences will arise as well.  There’s no need to cast blame.  Look lovingly on the scene, on yourself, on your partner, on the world.  I enjoy marking the milestones, and I’m finding I even enjoy moving on.

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Twelfth Night

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We have been experiencing some very unusual weather for January here in Wisconsin.  We have no snow, and it’s 50 degrees Fahrenheit.  Now, we often get what I call a “January thaw”, but this year, it’s been all thaw and no freeze.  I worry about the polar bears further north trying to adjust to these conditions.  And while I’m sure that climate changes are part of the natural process, I can’t imagine that 7 billion people aren’t having an impact on this.

I did another training day at the Nature Center.  We were learning about winter tracking.  Well, there isn’t any snow to see tracks in.  But there’s mud and other evidence that critters are alive and well, even in winter.  I like the fact that Wehr Nature Preserve is a “passive recreation” area.  That means that we don’t allow jogging, biking, skiing, snowmobiling, or pets on the trails.  There are plenty of other places for that.   Believe it or not, though, my most exciting animal encounter yesterday happened at dusk at a city park, right near a noisy train track and a major through road.  In the stream by the sidewalk, this muskrat was heading toward his home with a bit of a root in his mouth.

I snapped this picture as he headed under the footbridge where I was standing.  On the other side, he swam about 8 more feet away and then disappeared under the water with a flip of his tail.  The underwater entrance to his burrow must have been nearby.  I was so excited to see him with his vertical tail rudder, just skimming happily through the stream!

And then, the sky….I couldn’t stop taking pictures.

On a night like last night, I could well imagine setting off on a camel to follow yonder light just because its luminescence compelled me.  It invites me to slow down and enter a silent world, removed, far off.   The traditions of the ancient festivals of Twelfth Night and Epiphany support an opportunity to view the world differently, upside down, where God comes in and shakes up our status quo, socially, politically, theologically.  Things are not as we suppose they are.  They are always changing, always new and more mysterious than we can fathom.  Time stands open for us to feel a great discovery.  “Aha!  There!  I see it!”  The great challenge is then never to put that experience into a box, or build a booth around it, a tabernacle or edifice.   Be stupefied and humbled forever.  And keep your eyes open for the next epiphany.

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“Weasel”ing Out of This One

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I enjoy feeling like a little kid.  Doing my training at the Nature Center affords me to opportunity to look wide-eyed and ask questions, blurt out associations that spring to mind, and sometimes just be the smart alec  in the front row.   I find myself pointing at things for the rest of the day, going “Oh!  Look at that!”  The world is amazing.  So, I’m just going to post some photos today as my way of poking you in the shoulder and saying, “Lookee, lookee!”

Guess what we learned about at the Nature Center?  Winter camouflage.  The short-tailed weasel becomes the ermine in winter.  He gets to change his name as well as his coat.

They're smaller than I thought, about 6 inches without the tail.

From my bedroom window, I can watch the sun set at about 5pm each evening.  Last night, we got some intense colors.  I wish I had a better camera.  I’d set up a tripod…maybe on the porch roof, looking west, and do a long exposure.

I found this poor Canada goose just off the sidewalk of a church.  I wonder if he fell from the sky or tried to land on the parking lot.  There’s no open water anywhere in the vicinity.

We ask our 3 year old class what the colors of winter are.  I always think of blue: sky blue, ice blue, pale blue.

And in the “they just don’t make ’em like they used to” category…

I’m going to go take my inner 4-year old outside again.  The sun is still shining, and we have very little snow.  Carpe Diem!

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Space in 3D

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I went back to school today at the Wehr Nature Center for volunteer teacher training, and I finally figured out how the moon’s phases and eclipses are produced.  It took a hands-on experiment with a classroom of adults to finally get the concept across.  There was a bare light-bulb illuminated on a stand.  We all stood around in a circle, facing it.  Then we were each handed a four-inch Styrofoam ball on a stick.  This represented the moon.  We were the earth.  Placing the ball in front of us at arm’s length to block out the light from the bulb, we got the concept of a solar eclipse.  Moving the ball slightly so that the shadow no longer fell on our faces symbolizes the new moon.  Taking the “mooncicle” in an orbit to our left, we watched the crescent of light appear and grow larger until it reached the quarter moon position at a 90 degree angle.  Then, we circled it around until we were between the “moon” and the “sun”.  Our shadow cast on the moon is a lunar eclipse.  Eclipses don’t happen every month, because the moon’s orbit isn’t in synch like that.  Crescent on the left is waxing, crescent on the right is waning .  Got it.  Then our naturalist asked us, “Does the moon rotate?”  Um.  Well, there’s a dark side of the moon that we never see, so….no?  Wrong.  If the moon didn’t rotate, we’d see the dark side eventually.  Because the moon rotates just once every month, we always see its face.  Huh?  It wasn’t until two volunteers did a “do-Si-doe” maneuver and then an earth-facing cycle that I realized that the moon rotates in order to always face the earth.  Ah, the light dawns!!

Then we did an experiment that proved to me that learning about astronomy from a 2-dimensional textbook was not helpful!  We partnered up.  One person got a 4-inch ball for the earth.  One got a pom-pom sized ball for the moon.  We were asked to hold those objects at the distance we figured would represent a scale model of the actual distance the moon is away from the earth.  I eye-balled it at about 12 inches.  That’s what I remember from illustrations and posters.  We were then handed a piece of string that had been measure to the real scale.  I took my end and began walking.  I ended up 10 feet away.  In order to put that scale into a textbook, the dot for the moon would be too small for most kids to see.

Waxing Crescent

Here’s another little blip of information that I discovered.  During the month of August, my birth month, the predominant constellation visible in the southern sky is called Aquila.  Aquila means “eagle” and according to mythology, he was a pet of Jupiter and did many tasks for him (like continually attacking Prometheus while he was bound to a mountain side).  There is also a character in the Bible named Aquila.  He was the husband of Priscilla.  I wonder if my parents were aware of this ancient coincidence when they named their August girl Priscilla?

I could barely wait to get home and tell Steve what I learned.  I love school!

 

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Zeal for Thy House

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We watched another installment of Simon Schama’s “Power of Art”; this one was on Van Gogh.  I didn’t know that he attempted a career as a missionary and was released for his “over-zealousness”.  That zeal, that fervor exploded in color and paint a few years later.  Perhaps the misfiring of his neurological circuits added to the visions he experienced, but that doesn’t make them any less real, does it?  For the film, an actor portrays him eating an entire tube of chrome yellow.  It is an intensely sensuous clip.  It makes me want to feel the passion myself, love and zeal and lust in an explosion of warm color and bright hope.  I wish I had art sliding around like finger paint beneath my skin.

Making chocolate truffles with my daughter; good gooey creativity

I feel the need to make something.  It’s going to end up being a pot of chili and some yeasty corn bread from scratch.  I wish I had some clay or acrylics lying around to play with, but I suppose it’s just as well I don’t.  I’d feel bad about wasting expensive materials just for the tactile exploration.  Still, I feel a tension within me longing for creative release.  Perhaps that’s because I haven’t been singing regularly for a while, or playing the piano.  I miss getting caught up in the joy of expression.  Do you suppose that our society suffers from creative repression on a massive scale?  With all the technology we have to take creativity out of our hands, are we fueling a psychotic collapse?  What if we staged a revolutionary return to physical creativity, set up mud pie and garden therapy stations, bread dough and needlework,  improvisational dance and percussion…would we see a decline in depression, suicide and domestic violence?

My fingertips get a mild work out typing every day, but it doesn’t feel like enough.  I used to do 8 hours of typing, telephoning, and staring at a screen in a cubicle every day.  It got very old.  I’m lucky to be done with that.  I hope that we don’t press people into that kind of thing more exclusively as our society “progresses”.  It seems pretty soul-killing.  I’d like to set them all free in a wheat field with a box of squishy colors and a canvas and let them stay out all day until the sun sets.  Then invite them to share a bottle of wine with me, some good crusty bread, and listen to them describe their experiences while they show me their work.  I want to hear their zeal and watch it float free into the world…with mine.

 

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New Year, new goals, new reads

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Monday morning, back to work.  Orders for Scholar & Poet Books piled up on our dining room table over the weekend.  We’ll be taking more than 35 packages to the Post Office to be mailed today.  Some are self-help books on diet, procrastination, and clutter management.  Some are theology books, some poetry, some fiction, some children’s books, some history.  Words to buttress a new year of aspirations.  Which words will I apply to my year?

I’m not one for making New Year’s resolutions, really.  The sense of obligation and failure tweaks too much of what I’m trying to outgrow.  It struck me as I was flipping through a book of poetry by a Korean writer that we have our cultural and familial flavors stamped on us pretty early.  Guilt, shame, obligation, work ethic, judgment.  If we are aware and astute, we grow to recognize it.  If we are brave, we engage with it and come to a deeper understanding.  My Anglican family leaned toward perfectionism, rationalism, judgment.  There was always a “right” way to do something.  I want to push myself to get past that kind of assessment  and look more kindly at what is in the world.  I’ve noticed a few things that are: I’m getting older and putting on weight more easily.  Without judging myself too much, I want to be aware of my health and support it.  I’m aware of my desire to write my memoirs.  I want to turn that desire into an artifact.   I’m also aware of my desire to live lightly and gently on the planet.  Without nailing goals to the doors of my consciousness, can I make efforts and decisions that will guide me closer to the life I envision?  We’ll see.

Steve & I finished reading D.H. Lawrence’s The Plumed Serpent, so we set up another book selection.  This is kind of a game for us.  Steve picks a box full of likely candidates and numbers them.  I pick two numbers, look at the books, and choose one.  The reject is then out of the running.  I keep doing this until I’ve gotten down to one book.  This is sometimes an agonizing process because I want to read them all!  This is where I have to tell myself that I can’t make a “wrong” choice.  If we get stuck with something we don’t enjoy, we can always abandon it and choose something else.  If we pass up something intriguing, we can always go back to it.  So, out of 24 books, I came away with Italo Calvino’s The Road to San Giovanni.  I feel bad about putting Rilke’s Letters on Cezanne on the reject stack, but I’ve been dipping into it anyway.  No, I’m not “cheating”.  I am living.  No, I’m not “undisciplined”.  I am feeding myself.  I think of Anne Lamott in Traveling Mercies describing the epiphany she had when she broke through her habits and learned to eat.  It’s not about setting up rules so that you can get neurotic about them.  It’s about feeling a hunger and responding to it.  Choosing what to read, choosing what to eat, choosing how to live.  It can be a simple, graceful process.  Why do we often make it torture?

Joyful possibilities set before us. Happy choosing!

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A New Year – 2012

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I really enjoy my No TV New Year’s celebrations.  My late husband was a habitual TV user.  He grew up that way, so New Year’s Eve with him always included some televised ball drop with interviews and pop music.  My parents stored the TV in the den closet and brought it out on for certain occasions like National Geographic specials and episodes of Masterpiece Theater and Monty Python.  Steve and I don’t even own a TV, so once more I am back on my original footing.  What do we do instead?  I’m so glad you asked.

Yesterday afternoon, after some homemade lentil soup, we snuggled up in bed with the laptop on the breakfast tray to watch another installment of the DVD we borrowed from the library: Simon Schama’s “The Power of Art”.  The featured artist this time was JMW Turner.  Epic skies, light, emotion, chaos, romanticism.  The photography in the film paralleled the visual of the oil paintings quite effectively.  It was a scenic feast.  The sun was setting while we watched and cast its last rays across the bed as it ended.  We discussed the experience for a while, and then I excused myself to nod off for a nap.  My brain was over-stimulated, I think, and I needed to close my eyes to let the images settle.

I awoke about an hour later.  I was thinking about a book on photography that my son had been browsing on Christmas.  I went downstairs to find it and fix drinks and appetizers.  Steve joined me and brought a book on Turner that he had found in his stack.  So we nibbled brie and Gorgonzola on crackers and sipped vodka martinis while looking at pictures and discussing art.  The attempt to point to something beyond ourselves, to depict holistically the experience of living in body, mind and soul…how do we do that?  Reality isn’t all realistic…impressionism, expressionism & romanticism try to get at something more, something beyond, some movement and change that is hidden but implied.  As we talked, the salmon fillet was baking and the brown rice simmering.  We moved on to dinner and talked about memories.  I was recalling the last heart surgery my late husband had and how I tried to manage my anxiety as I looked out the window in the atrium of the cardiac wing.   Consciousness and fear, peace and presence.  What is reality, anyway?  I drained my glass of the last drops of Chardonnay and cleared the dishes.  We then settled on the couch with James Joyce’s Dubliners to read our favorite story, “The Dead”.  I first read this aloud to Steve our first Christmas together.  We had gone to a bed & breakfast place in Whitewater, Wisconsin called The Hamilton House.  We had “The Pisarro” room in this 1861 mansion, and I read to him from the satin-covered four poster that night.  I remembered enjoying a chance to use my theatrical British accent and reveling in the details of the text that reminded me of my family’s Christmas celebrations.  I had absorbed the atmosphere and the dialogue, but didn’t really catch the arc of the piece that first time.  I had been curiously surprised to find Steve in tears as I finished.  So, last night, I paid particular attention to the end of the story, the widening of scope in the main character’s vision.  The story is brilliantly crafted.  “His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.”  I read the final line and looked up to see Steve wiping his eyes.  He spoke a while about the expansive feeling of love that story illustrates for him.

Subdued but happy, I rose to check the time.  It was already NYC midnight, so I brought out the bottle of champagne and the fruitcake my eldest sister had sent.   Now, I know what you’re thinking.  “You had me up to the fruitcake!”  But listen, this recipe has been in my family for as long as I can remember.  It’s Julia Child’s version, I think.  It’s dark and rich with fruit and nuts and brandy and rum.  I topped our slices off with a little hard sauce, too.  (You know, brandy and sugar and butter…like frosting.)  Forget your prejudices and work with me, people!  So we ate fruitcake, sipped champagne and talked about our year together.  I moved in with him last January 10; he’d been living alone almost his entire adult life.  We had my daughter’s cat for the first 8 months of the year.  We took a 4 week road trip to the West Coast in April.  We entertained family and friends for dinner and “sleep overs”.  We have changed, danced, been with each other in all of our facets and moods.  It’s been a beautiful year.  The digital clock on the stove shone out 12:00 and we kissed.  We finally put on some music to accompany the new year.  Steve selected the movie soundtrack from “2001: A Space Odyssey”. We skipped the Richard Strauss and listened to the atonal and dissonant Ligeti pieces and then the Blue Danube waltz.  Mysterious, elegant, spacious.  Our world is huge.  I don’t like to imagine it being shut up in a box on TV.  I am looking forward to sampling it all year in different ways, through all of my senses.

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New Year’s Eve

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The social tradition in this country is to spend New Year’s Eve with the person who is most important to you, someone with whom you’d like to spend your future.  That first kiss of the New Year is supposed to impart good fortune for the year to come.  For many Americans, then, it’s off to parties to drink up and link up in an attempt to avoid the curse of loneliness for the rest of your life.

Yeah, well, I’ve never seen it quite like that.  You see, New Year’s Eve is also my mother’s birthday.  We always spent it at home, having a family celebration.  When I got married and moved out, my new nuclear family did the same thing.  We dressed up in prom gowns and tuxes (and sometimes like pirates) and danced in the living room, sipping champagne and listening to the weirdest music we had.  Kisses were passed between husbands and wives and fathers and daughters and mothers and sons and sometimes siblings.  Our future was with the family; our past was with the family.  The two were intertwined, and we liked it that way.  We watched the ball drop in NYC some years, and sometimes we just let the kids run outdoors with big spoons and pots and pans and make all the noise they liked at midnight.  One year, we were visiting Jim’s best friend’s family, and the kids had a silly string fight in the middle of the street that afternoon.  They made a huge mess.   Which makes me wonder: who cleans up the confetti after New Year’s Eve in NYC?  How much gets recycled?

New Year's Eve 1992 or 1993?

Who do I want to be next year?  My future is rooted in my past and lived in the present.  I will always live with my family legacy coursing through my veins, pulsating in my brain.  I am my father & mother’s daughter, Jim’s lover, my kids’ mother, and that will stay with me year after year.  I am also Steve’s partner, a writer, a budding naturalist.  I hope to become a home economist & ecologist.  I want to keep on practicing awareness, appreciation, attitude and action.  Ultimately, the person with whom I will spend my future is…myself.  At the stroke of midnight, I’ll look myself in the eye and say, “You and me, kid!  It’s gonna be a great year!”  Hopefully, I won’t feel cross-eyed and alone when I do.  And I promise I’ll clean up after myself.