THE SPOT YOU STAND ON

BOUNCING BACK - A hard fall means a high bounce... if you're made of the right material.  ~Unknown

I sat in my fourth grade art class, flummoxed. I stared at the large piece of art paper, my 48 crayons standing ready. The assignment: Draw a picture of your dad for Fathers’ Day.

It was 1956 and I was the only kid in the class who had a problem with this. I approached the teacher, careful to keep my voice low.

“Mrs. Albright,” I said, “My father died.”

“Oh, well then,” she replied, “An uncle? Your grandfather?”

I shook my head.

“Do you want to just do a picture of your mother instead?”

Good. Clarity. Permission to do the only logical thing. I turned out a very nice giant head of my mother in her pearl earrings which she rarely wore, but which gave a bit of glamour to my picture. As I glanced at my classmates’ pictures, I had that familiar outsider feeling, my nose pressed to the glass of their normal families.

If you would have asked me then about my life story, it would have been all about differences. I was an only child on the Irish Catholic South Side of Chicago; the second tallest girl in the class, and absolutely no good at high jump. I couldn’t ride a bike. I’d had one briefly, but it got lifted from the storage room at my building. I would blush if anyone so much as glanced at me, which provided a direct window into my insecurities, a source of torture for me. And I was afraid of dogs.

For balance, I was a good student, also a very polite girl and a good friend. I had the nicest mother, and plenty of great relatives even if they were in two different states and I only saw them once a year.

By high school, I would have told you that I was coming out of the shrinking violet stage – I was editorial editor on the school paper, had some dates, and could see a big future for myself. But I still felt encapsulated by the idea that everyone else knew more than I did about how families, and life, really worked.

I can’t pinpoint exactly when I stopped minding my differences. Some of them fell away, others became unimportant, and others became points of pride. I took up Pilates instead of high jump. I rarely blush these days, and can pretty much talk to anyone about anything. My father may have died early, but my mother hung on until she was almost 89.

I have greatly revised my life story with time. I bounced back from my original outsider status. And I know now that my strengths came out of those early challenges. I had to grow a backbone to take care of myself in the world. All that watching other people’s lives developed empathy that I turned into my career as a therapist. I don’t need to make out Gratitude Lists; I have a built-in appreciation for the gifts of life, which I know are all the more precious because they may not last.

As a result I tell myself what I tell my clients: No one else on the planet has seen what you have seen; has encountered what you have, both good and bad. No one else has your combination of gifts and insights, or will ever occupy the spot you stand on. So, forget fitting in. The world would be incomplete without you just as you are, like a quilt missing its most vivid piece.

Note: A shorter version of this piece may be posted by now at www.thisibelieve.org, a reincarnation of the classic Edward R. Murrow radio series from the 1950s. Go to read hundreds of pieces from current contributors and from the original series.

CBH 11-10

UP IN SMOKE

OUT OF THE ASHES - It's best to have failure happen early in life. It wakes up the Phoenix bird in you so you rise from the ashes. ~ Anne Baxter

It was a sunny Saturday morning. I trailed my friends around a lovely suburban garden center on a sunny Saturday morning. More enthusiastic gardeners than I, they examined odd varieties of ferns and rusty garden sculptures while I daydreamed. Old college friends, we gather every once in a while to talk for hours and tour around spots of interest while our husbands go off to regress into their long-ago frat boy selves, to everyone’s entertainment, especially theirs.

My cell phone rang and my heart sank when I saw it was a counselor who worked with me in my practice. Sigh. This must be a client crisis bad enough that she had to notify me.

“Maraline,” I said, “What’s up?”

“Where are you?” she asked.

“Um, Elburn, or St. Charles, not sure. For the weekend,” I said.

“You don’t know what happened to the office then,” she said.

“No.”

“There was a fire. Last night,” she said.

“Oh,” I said, relieved that we weren’t dealing with a suicidal client or a child abuse report.

“No one was in the building. They think it started around 11 o’clock,” she told me.

“Well, that’s good. I’ll be back Sunday night. I can deal with it Monday.”

“You don‘t understand. It burned down. To the ground. There is no office anymore,” she said.

Unimaginable. I loved that office. In a shared suite building, its two counseling rooms, small administration space, and a large group room we reserved a couple of nights a week for groups provided just what we needed and nothing more. And we had a private storeroom in the basement where twenty years worth of counseling files were secured. I had downsized into that building and it fit perfectly.

I had friends and friendly acquaintances in that building, other counselors and massage therapists, an investment guy, an outplacement consultant, a dentist, an accountant, a couple of lawyers, all held together by the personable front desk secretary who always said yes and never made a face when you asked something of her.

“You need to come now. To see if you can salvage anything,” she said.

Salvage anything? What? Goodbye garden center. Goodbye carefree weekend.

“Thanks, Maraline, for calling,” I said, “I guess,” attempting humor.

“I just left there,” she said, about to deliver the line I needed to hear to get me into action. “Some of our stuff is strewn in the parking lot. I picked up what I could.” she asked.

Yikes. Client files in the parking lot? Nooooo.

“Okay, I’m on my way.”

“Can I meet you there?” she offered.

“Um, no. I’ll call you if I need to.” I had no idea what I was saying.

I rallied my friends, who also offered to help, and got them to take me back to pick up my car at the house where we were staying. No, thanks, I’d go myself; I could handle this. Why ruin their much-anticipated day? I arranged to meet them later for dinner at a restaurant in a nearby town.

I had accomplished step one of my usual crisis management protocol: Refuse help.

In the car I was strangely calm, yet disoriented. Where was the map? Which expressway am I looking for? How could this have happened? That’s when I had my first good idea of the day. I called my daughter, recently returned from college for the summer.

“Kate, I’m coming to pick you up. My office burned down. “

“Whoa, okay,” she said.

“Get out the crow bars and some bags. And a hammer. I’ll be there in 30 minutes. And those file boxes in the basement. And wear crummy clothes.” I was starting to function, moving into my second step: Do something, anything, because everything is fixable.

I picked up Katy and took my usual 40 minute route to the office. As we rounded the final corner, I saw a pile of debris, unrecognizable as the two-story office building of a certain age, well beyond its peak but still quite serviceable. It had been light brick with tan and brown trim. The pile looked gray, with boards jutting toward the sky, and occasional accent colors – a green filing cabinet, a red table top, a yellow sign.

“Whoa,” Katy said again, capturing it perfectly. Wisps of smoke arose from the middle of the pile. One fire truck remained, and a firefighter trained water on the smoking debris.

We started walking the perimeter, trying to get our bearings. Our office must have been about there in the middle. The top floor had collapsed into the basement, but why couldn’t I spot a thing that was ours? Everything seemed displaced, upside down.

Several of my co-tenants climbed around the edges, gathering stray bits of their professional lives. Everyone looked as dazed as I felt, and as our eyes met, we shook our heads.

“Are you finding anything?” I asked.

“Not much,” they said.

I saw the accountant from across the hall. “I think I saw some of your paperwork over there,” she said, pointing toward the back corner of the lot.

How did it get all the way over there, thirty feet beyond the outer walls?

“Thanks,” I said, “Did you find yours?” She must have had years’ worth of client financial information in her computer.

“I came over as soon as I heard about it last night, and one of the firefighters retrieved my computer for me.”

Uh oh. I was seriously behind. We chased down the paperwork she had spotted, and spent the next seven hours gathering up any evidence of Healy & Associates that had escaped the inferno. Katy and her crowbar broke into bent file cabinets that had been hauled up from the storage room and dumped at the far corner of the parking lot by heavy machinery. The files that were water-logged we placed in boxes to take to the shredding company. The rest reeked of smoke, and we placed them in bags to go home with me, until we ran out.

My in-laws showed up, eager to find out what they could do to help, and we sent them to Dominick’s for plastic bags. They returned with so many that we could bag everything we came up with over the next days, and then use the remainder at home for the next five years.

When we got too hot, we walked across the street to Arby’s to get lemonade and snacks. When we got too tired, we would stop and talk with co-tenants. We repeated this for the next four days, until the equipment came to haul the pile away. With every day, we grew bolder, venturing into the debris further and further trying to decode the logic of the pile. We walked tightrope style on wobbly boards, searching for our relics.

We finally located the epicenter of our operation and found the roll of “20 years of excellence” stickers I had ordered in a fit of self-congratulation, the seal embosser we used on official documents, and the Mickey Mouse mouse pad, also a melted calculator, and the CONFIDENTIAL stamp we put on all records. I even found a section of our plaid couch and cut some fabric from it just because I‘d never see it again.

We eventually found the computer under two feet of someone else’s stuff. Even though the case was bashed in and the components melted, I later took it to an expert to insure that the data was gone.

Once I had it, and took the recovered files home to air out on my garage floor, I started to relax. At least no one could wander into the site and invade my clients’ privacy. By then, I had begun step three of my crisis process: Compare this mess with how much worse it could have been, and be glad.

With the building gone, I embarked on my next step: Trudge ahead. I talked turkey with the counselor who was my mainstay, and she agreed to continue with me despite the upheaval. A dear old friend offered me the use of his counseling space until we could relocate. I dealt with the intricacies of insurance documentation. And I spent hours of my life which I will never get back on the phone with the phone company, hearing, believing, and then no longer believing strings of unkept promises about when our phone number would be functioning again. While I never cried about the fire, Ameritech had me in tears more than once.

By the time I went out to shop for new office space, I was getting my spirit back. It was fun to imagine a new look, in a new space, closer to the Interstate, closer to my house, in a newer building with an elevator. I furnished it quickly but with enthusiasm. I picked out some art work, and the building put down new carpet. Within a month, we opened. It looked great.

At home, much later, I carried out my next step: Create a balance sheet of what I’d gained and lost. I preserved some of my hard-won artifacts in a shadow box I still keep in my current office, next to the picture of the disaster site – including melted pens, the charred office items, twisted doorknob, office keys.

I tallied what we never found – the gate leg table my husband and I refinished as our first dining table, the painting of a rainy street I’d bought while I was in college, notes from dozens of seminars I’d attended, and much more that either went up in smoke or was buried forever under the charred ruins, now scraped away to a landfill somewhere.

I had lost the company of my co-tenants, the built-in clerical support I counted on, and my comfortable routine. But I also lost the burden of maintaining all that stuff. The files that had filled up a storeroom now fit in two filing cabinets.

On the what-I-gained side, I made several additional entries, starting with a new insight that when someone offers help, you probably should accept it. I also gained a renewed conviction that what my practice did was worthwhile and important to continue. By that time managed care had already taken a bite out of the bottom line, but the other rewards were still rich. Combine that with my innate determination not to buckle under to disaster, and I formed a picture of myself as one of those blow-up clowns that gets punched and pops back up. I was reminded that all I really needed to continue was a room and two chairs. The rest was window dressing. So ultimately I ended up with a new start, lighter on my feet and clear about my purpose.

That first night though when I arrived at dinner late, all cleaned up and in a dress, I was unsure how it would all turn out. I’d called to tell them to go ahead and order, but being the friends they are, they snacked and drank and waited until I got there. If I remember right, I got a standing ovation when I walked in, or at least a toast. We ordered steaks, and I told a few stories from the day, but mostly relaxed into the normalcy of their company. In the morning, I’d have to return to disaster mode, but at the table my final step of the day kicked in: Loss helps you appreciate what you still have.

CBH 10-10

THE LEGACY OF PAUL POWELL

CORRUPTION - Corruption is like a ball of snow, once it's set a rolling it must increase. ~ Charles Caleb Colton

As a lifelong resident of Illinois, I was brought up on corruption. One of my favorite examples comes from 1970. Paul Powell was Secretary of State. Two days after his unexpected death, $800,000 in cash was discovered squirreled away in his home/hotel room in shoe boxes, along with 49 cases of whisky, 14 transistor radios and 2 cases of creamed corn, presumably ill-gotten gains from his $30,000 per year position. I was fascinated that anybody could have that assortment in their closet. And at the lack of security – anyone could take off with that cash and who could he report it to?

Since then we have seen three governors end up in prison: Otto Kerner (conspiracy, perjury, income tax charges), Dan Walker (fraud), George Ryan (bribes), who may be joined by the impeached Rod Blagojevich who will be retried (pay to play, lying to FBI) next year.

How could this continue to happen, one wonders. The answers are especially easy to come up with in this political season that has shown us a world-class display of mud-slinging and a complete absence of rational discussion. We know that corruption thrives not just in Illinois, though we do appear to provide a particularly rich Petri dish for its propagation. We know that it lives elsewhere too because we have the opportunity to enjoy the most outrageous ads from other states on the evening news, night after night. Follow this link http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/10/29/2010-the-year-in-campaign_n_776270.html to see some examples (including the Carly Fiorina Demon Sheep ad) of where that money went. Typically, the news segment about outrageous ads ends with journalists shaking their heads in disapproval as if they were innocent in all this. Not so much.

Just like the Hollywood stars and the paparazzi who trail them, our politicians are involved in a host-parasite relationship with hangers-on who live off of them while providing what they can’t do without – attention.

Take the news industry. Venerated Meet the Press host Tim Russert explained his approach this way – he studied the positions of his guest, took the opposite tack in his questioning, and made an interesting show out of it. Nothing wrong there. We certainly want journalists to keep track of our candidates, but their increasingly rabid reporting of each and every unsubstantiated charge, misstep, overheard conversation, and personal peccadillo, as if they were more important than their positions on the issues, serves to stir the pot. They end up reporting on the frenzy their reports cause instead of the actual news.

At the same time, the advertising industry and TV and radio stations get their own stimulus packages with each political cycle. This year it’s as if it’s become a reality show: How Low Will They Go? The most outrageous charges, vitriolic attacks; the interviews with actors (or are they real voters, so well informed that they are outraged at the opponent’s very existence, when most people have trouble even remembering who their Senator is?) who scold and castigate.

Can you think of any better way to spend the $3 billion that was just spent on political ads this year? Like ending world hunger, reducing the deficit, or just spending it on consumer goods to jumpstart the economy?

At least the political season has an ending date. Imagine if the advertising folks applied this approach to their regular clients all year long. Burger King ads might end with, “Why does this Ronald Mc Donald continue to lurk around innocent children? Have you checked your local sex offender registry lately, for a guy with big shoes and red hair? And what’s with the red lipstick?”

Or Duracell on the Energizer Bunny: “Just how does that bunny keep on going and going? Ask Marian Jones, or Lance Armstrong, or Barry Bonds what they think. That is your battery on steroids. Is that what you want to run your children’s toys?” We’d finally have to turn off the TV for good.

Which brings us to the candidates themselves. Eric Zorn of the Chicago Tribune called this year’s candidates for Illinois Governor and Senate “as flawed and uninspiring a quartet of glad-handers as ever aspired to lead and represent our state.” Nicely put.

While their cause is being advanced by the amoral advertisers, behind the scenes the candidates sink lower and lower. The more they accuse and blame and threaten us with each other, the more anxious we all get, until we reach the current country-wide anxiety attack. The sky is falling, and we each get the chance to bet on one side or the other to stave off disaster. Oh no. What if we guess wrong? Catastrophe!

At least two corrupting influences operate here. First, what the candidates have to do to raise the money necessary to participate in this system. They may not be keeping it in shoeboxes, but what kind of promises do they make to come up with that $3 billion? And how will that keep them from doing what they should?

Some solve that problem by funding their own campaigns, like Illinois Lt. Governor candidate and pawnbroker Scott Lee (Not a Career Politician) Cohen who put $2.1 million into his race. After some revelations about his personal life, he was chased out by the party. Once he decided that leaving was a mistake, he dropped back in and siphoned an additional $3.8 million into his new independent campaign. In California, it’s worse. Ex-eBay CEO Meg Whitman makes Cohen look like a penny-pincher. She has put up $141.6 million of her own in her run for governor (which sounds like a lot until you find out she is worth $1.9 billion).

What is the payoff for such extravagance? What is it about holding the office that would justify that investment? It must be the second corrupting influence, power. What sort of megalomaniac would make that tradeoff? Besides, if they spend like that to get elected, how will they spend our money once they get there? I can predict their outcome – elected or not, especially not, it won’t be worth it.

Wait, you say? What if it’s a desire to serve, an altruistic motive? Perhaps, but there are thousands of ways to help make things better that send resources directly to people who need them, not into a political system that yields nothing tangible in the end but a pile of receipts in a zero sum game.

As soon as we can look back on this election season with some distance, maybe we’ll find some pluses. While we have so much else to worry about with the economy and security, maybe the excess and vitriol we’ve just seen will finally be enough, and we’ll come up with some candidates next time around who can do better; candidates who won’t corrupt our open exchange of ideas with their fear-mongering and power-grabbing.

Maybe we’ll manage to ratchet up our own expectations for intelligent discussion of the issues instead of gotcha politics.

And maybe we’ll be able to recognize that things naturally run in waves, that power inevitably flows from one place to another over time, that no one side is ever entirely right or entirely wrong, and most importantly, that people who disagree don’t have to despise each other. Maybe we can convince our politicians that the rest of us want to see cooperation and problem-solving. Our communal anxiety would recede. The people who could pull that off would win, hands down.

CBH 09/10

BORROWING MAGIC

Borrowing  -  I not only use all the brains that I have, but all that I can borrow. ~ Woodrow T. Wilson

My first book incident occurred when I was eight. My mother discovered me hiding under the covers late at night with a copy of E.B. White’s Charlotte’s Web and a flashlight. She ordered me to turn it off and get to sleep. She did not see the tears streaming down my cheeks – you can tell where I was in the story – so did not perceive that there would be no going to sleep until I finished it. Despite my generally compliant nature, I waited about ten seconds after she left before I flipped the light on and plunged back in. Any reader would understand.

When I was 41, I moved to a new town that left me with a 40 minute commute five days a week. Looking for a way to make the most of the time, I borrowed my first book on tape. At the time I’d been too wrapped up in child-raising and business-running and personal exhaustion to fit in anything so self-indulgent as reading fiction. I worried a little that I might drive into a ditch as the story took off, but a new channel seemed to open in my brain to allow me to keep track of both listening and driving. With the first words of Maeve Binchey’s Glass Lake, I was transported to midcentury Ireland by the lilting narration. I grabbed the case expecting to see a good old Irish name – O’Connell, Murphy, Duffy, but no, the narrator with the perfect brogue was named – Barbara Rosenblatt? I was hooked – this was some new world. Ever since, like any addict, I monitor my supply of audio books, and carry two or three backups in case I finish the current one far from the library.

This summer I had another book moment. I was caught up in The Help, Kathryn Stockett’s story of a young Southern woman with progressive leanings who tries to fit back into her traditional hometown after college, set at the dawn of the civil rights movement. The author depicts the intersection of her character’s privileged life and the lives of the black servants employed by her family and all the other white families of means. Stockett took chances, in the use of black dialect that could offend, for instance, and her failure to include any white characters with a conscience beyond her heroine. But you could tell where her heart lay.

I reached that familiar stage of sadness that the book is almost over and urgency to find out how it ends. When I shut the book for the last time, I began my conversation with the author: why did you have to wrap it up so neatly and so quickly? When didn’t you spend more time on the central mystery – what happened to Constantine, the main character’s nanny? I was disgruntled. I was disappointed. I was mad.

But I knew better. Where do I get off telling someone else how to tell her tale? I guess I get off because I just invested hours of my time in her story. I had formed a relationship with this book and felt it let me down at the very end.

What makes up this relationship? It begins with the author’s impulse to write, in this case about an era she witnessed and had some unfinished business with. There are plenty of other reasons to write. Some of us get through life by scratching out journal entries that put our thoughts and feelings in order. And we write, well, email, to keep our relationships current. And we write to make ourselves clear, in business and in life. And sometimes, we write because someone asks us to, about things we would rather forget.

Looking to understand the effect of writing things down, researcher James Pennebaker (Opening Up, 1990) asked subjects to write for 15 minutes 4 days in a row about the worst trauma they’d ever experienced. Control subjects were told to write about trivial nonemotional topics for the same amount of time. Afterwards, the trauma-writing group had fewer doctor visits, greater success at work, and long term mood changes for the good. This powerful effect held up even if no one ever read the words.

Which brings us to the other half of the equation – the reader. Beyond our private diaries, if we bother to write things down, most of us want to be read, and we make decisions about how to best tell our story so that other people will want to keep going. In nonfiction, we sort through the facts we can recall using our imperfect and selective memories to pick out the juiciest ones; in fiction, we imagine the most vivid “facts” that could be true for our characters.

Even though new writers are told to write what they know, there must be questions to answer and discoveries to make or both writer and reader will nod off. One of my favorite quotes (attributed to various authors, Patricia Hampl and Margaret Atwood among them) is “I write to find out what I know.” Exactly.

Knowing the lengths that authors go to to engage in this process, I used to feel compelled to finish every book I started. Now, I am comfortable setting one aside, knowing that there is an audience out there for what the author has to say, it’s just not me. Besides, I already am going to have to stay alive until I’m 105 just to finish the books stacked up in the giant basket in my office where they collect dust and watch me disapprovingly if I’m goofing off instead of reading them. Given that pressure, I don’t have time to read a book that was meant for someone else.

Thoreau said, “It takes two to speak the truth – one to speak, and another to listen.” We each read for our own reasons – for pleasure, to soothe loneliness, to visit other places, to escape the drudgery or uncertainty of daily life, to learn, to fire our own imaginations. But how does that hold up in the age of texting and Tweeting and whatever is next?

At an Iowa writing event this summer, writing teacher and author Kyle Beachy explored whether literature is dying, as many predict. Relax, he said; it will never go away because it is irreplaceable. Its purpose is empathy – to allow us to feel what another feels, to put ourselves in another’s place to see what it would look like from there. At the end, we know something we didn’t know before.

When we read, we temporarily borrow another’s place on earth, hear their thoughts, see their challenges, feel their feelings. We get to time travel and see the past, consider the present and imagine the future. We go there to discover meaning beyond the obvious. There we see that what seems like a low point become the entryway into a whole unimagined new direction? Point of view is more than a literary device. It is the point.

Sure, the methods of distribution of what we read are changing. I’m reading, well, listening to on CD, A Moveable Feast by Hemingway about his Paris days in the 1920’s. He and his pal F. Scott Fitzgerald are described waiting for the check in the mail from each magazine story or even better, book advance, to buy their wine and pay their rent. There were no blogs, no social media, no viral posts, no shortcuts back then. It was write, sell, wait.

So we can rest easy. Nothing is dying. There will always be little girls sneaking a book after bedtime, and magical narrators to transport listeners to foreign places, and snapshots of life in a world that we missed. And if an author wants to write her ending in a way that disturbs me, I’ll have to get over it. I have all those other books waiting for me, and some to write as well.

CBH 08/10

WHIRLWIND

COMING HOME - There is a magic in that little world, home; it is a mystic circle that surrounds comforts and virtues never known beyond its hallowed limits. ~ Robert Southey

It was an end-of-summer organizing day at the house. The kids were just starting 3rd and 6th grades and I’d taken the day off to whip things into shape for the new school year. We took a lunch break at Show Biz pizza, played a few games, and came back home to finish up.


Eleven-year-old Ben worked in his room and probably sneaked in some reading, while Katy and I worked in hers, attempting to contain her many collections into the smallest room in the house. Clouds loomed, no rain yet. Disk jockey Steve Dahl reported that there was some weather coming in from the west. He made fun of how alarmist meteorologists and their weather-spotters get lathered up every time the sky darkens for a few minutes. He scoffed at a report that cars were turned over near I-55 in Plainfield.

In a way, we had our own weather-spotter right in-house. Ben had for some months been scanning the skies and worrying himself sick if the conditions looked right for severe weather, especially tornados. He tried to recruit us to his vigil, but as clueless parents often do, we dismissed his concerns and assured him that there was nothing to worry about. His dad was fond of telling him, “Ben, you have a better chance of winning the lottery than getting hit by a tornado.” Our wise Ben continued to watch the skies, and to try to warn us.


The phone rang and I ran downstairs to answer it. “Carolyn, this is Pat Henry. Is David home?”


That was weird. Pat was a consultant David worked with on some of his architectural projects. Certainly he should know that he’d be at the office at 3:30p.m. Why would he call here?


“No, Pat,” I said, “I’m sure you can get him at the office.”


“Sure, okay,” he said. “I’ll do that.” And then he said nothing more.


“So, okay,” I prompted. “Good to talk to you.”


“Right,” he said, “Same here.”


A minute later I was fully absorbed in the back to school project, and for the next hour traveled between the two bedrooms, the laundry room, and the big garbage can in the garage. I was trying to fit yet another box of crucially important belongings under Katy’s bed when the phone rang again.


It was David, husband and father to us three. “Hi.” His voice sounded a little husky. “I’m okay.”


“Good,” I replied. ‘I’m glad. Me too. We’ve just about got…”


“You haven’t heard anything, have you?” he said.


“No, what?”


“I was in a tornado. In Plainfield. The building came down around us,” he said.


“Wait, what?” I started to sneak away from the kids until I could take this in. “You were what?”


“Turn on the TV. You’ll see.” He proceeded to tell me a few details. He and his partner Cliff had been meeting with a group of teachers in the school administration building when it hit. The teachers had the wit to dive under the tables. He and Cliff stood up and tried to walk out into the hallway. They were blown back into the room. David clutched the door frame until it blew away and he was down. He watched concrete blocks swirl above his head like popcorn. When it was over, they stood up to find the building around their knees. They looked straight up to see the sky filled with lightning and pouring rain.


First, they helped the teachers to safety to wait for help for their broken bones, then stopped to attend a man also waiting for emergency help. They gradually realized that the reason he wasn’t moving was that he was impaled on a plank of wood. He survived.


Once they reached the periphery, they looked back to see the high school on fire, missing its roof, a disaster scene. The building they’d been in was the pile of rubble over there. Cliff’s car sat atop a pile of cars at the edge of the lot, its emergency flashers blinking on and off.


With no car, no phone service and loved ones to check on – Cliff’s son was supposed to be at the town pool– they headed to Cliff’s father’s office on a nearby busy street. His dad, the town doctor, knew nothing since his office windows faced away from the route of the storm. He took off for the hospital for emergency duty that would last into the night. Several phone calls later, Cliff located his son, and David made the call to me.


“Should I come and get you?” I asked.


“You’d never get near here. Cliff’s going to borrow a car. He’ll drop me off.”


You know how kids are with their radar for trouble. While I was trying to play it cool and not alarm them, Ben and Katy hovered to hear the whole story. I hung up and chose my words.


“Okay,” I said. “Dad’s fine, but he and Cliff were in a tornado. In Plainfield. He’ll be here.”


I turned off the radio while Steve Dahl apologized for his earlier dismissal as reports of the severe damage and loss of life – 29 in total we eventually learned, 3 at the school complex – came in. We switched to TV but there wasn’t much to see yet, and we already knew the most important thing – David was coming home.


I tried to reinstate normalcy in the house. We resumed our project, and ran back to the TV when there was a new report. Each of us began to take in the enormity of it – this could have been the worst day of our lives, and it wasn’t. I began to formulate my apology to Ben who tried to tell us that this might happen. To his credit, he never demanded it.


Katy spotted David first. “Dad’s coming up the walk and he looks terrible!”


Sure, he was covered with dust, his glasses were wrecked, his face was cut, but here he came. I had to disagree. He looked pretty good to me.


A whirlwind of another kind followed. After telling the story and answering all our questions, he gobbled a sandwich, and went to Lenscrafters where they beat their new-glasses-in-one-hour promise, and he could see again. I went along when he headed for Plainfield and Joliet to help figure out how to start a school year with 1200 students and no building.


The next night was our 20th anniversary. We spent it at an emergency school board meeting, which was more romantic than it sounds. In the past 20 years, much has changed – the kids are on their own, years of new events have layered over the memory of the tornado. But when he shows up every night, or calls me during the day, there is something that still remains of that day, a whiff of gratitude, and recognition of what might have been.


CBY 07/10

GRIEF AND RELIEF

RELIEF - Can I see another's woe, and not be in sorrow, too? Can I see another's grief, and not seek for kind relief? ~ William Blake

My mother called me, incensed. She’d just found the receipt from her doctor’s visit a week before. Uh oh. How did I let that fall into her hands?
“Do you know what that doctor wrote down?” she demanded.


Yes, I did know. I had taken her in for an opinion on her increasing forgetfulness.


“Dementia!” she sputtered. “How could he say that?”


I summoned my reassuring reasonable self. “Mom, remember we went in to talk to him about your memory?”


“We did?”


“Yes. We discussed it,” I said. “That’s just medical language for that conversation.”


“Well, what did he say?” she wanted to know.


“That your memory isn’t what it used to be,” I said, “But we knew that.”


She chuckled, “I guess.”


She didn’t ask the next question and I didn’t answer it. Where would this lead us, and when?


Like many others, just you reach the point when your kids are launching their own lives, and you think that your life is about to become your own again, your parent begins to need you in a whole new way. As she teetered on the precipice of neediness and debilitation, you realize that it threatens to take you down too. Your narrative changes. The one about the largely joyful journey toward your kids’ independence is replaced by the one about the descent into your parent’s encroaching and eventually total dependence.


The best thing to say about this experience is that it gives you the smallest peek into what she must be going through. The worst thing is that it won’t go away until she dies. The dance between grief and relief has begun.


At first, I deny. I explain away the crumpled fenders, forgotten appointments, inability to work the remote control. I tease her, “Good thing your head is attached or you’d lose it, huh Mom,” when I really want to scream, “We talked about this two hours ago – how on earth could you forget?”


After the totaled car, the terrified call that a hallucination of a boy is in the corner, the forgotten pan on the stove that led to the condo building being evacuated, I couldn’t deny anymore.


That’s when the first unexpected wave of relief arrived. Once I used my energy to face reality instead of run from it, I gave up my dreams of someday getting to say, “Yep, she’s 94 and sharp as a tack.” Instead it became, “Well, she’s 79 and her memory is a problem, but she still knows me, so that’s something.”


I developed a plan. I scheduled appointments for us to visit assisted living facilities which she forgot to get dressed for and then declined to attend. I went alone and chose the one that had daily current events discussions over the one that had residents paste construction paper into mosaics.


Then I tried to scale the mountain of her resistance, “I’m perfectly fine. I don’t see why I can’t just stay in my condo.” I got nowhere. Then she fell again and the doctor forbid her to return home without 24 hour supervision. Reality trumps desire.


I picked the nicest corner room overlooking a pond, and moved her in, staying over the first night to ease any confusion. When I walked out the next morning into a gorgeous fall day, I realized that from now on there would be people looking over her all day and all night. This day that I had dreaded for so long brought another surprising wave of relief.


Weeks later, after I had cleared out her condo and put it on the market, I drove her over there, wondering if the sting of her forced departure had been soothed by her new safe surroundings. She looked at the building without recognition. She wasn’t pining for her old independent life because she couldn’t remember it. More relief.


As her awareness of her plight faded, other ties with her past and expectations for the future fell away, and she lived more and more in the moment. We regularly perused the scrapbook my daughter made for her. One day, she no longer recognized the picture of Bob, the love of her life who died when they were 34.


“Who’s this?” she asked.


“That’s Bob, your husband, my father,” I said.


“Really,” she said. She took a closer look, bewildered. How could you forget your own husband?


Rather than continue my campaign to get her to remember, I could let each visit focus on right now – how the sunlight looked on the trees in the courtyard, how the breeze stirred them. By now, she was in the memory unit of a nursing home, which became a godsend. A multi-cultural team of caregivers somehow managed to see through the fog of her dementia and find the bright, funny, kind person she had always been. Thanks to them, there was lots of laughter still to come. Who knew to expect that?


As she lost language, we no longer struggled to get ideas across to each other but settled for sharing the moment. Every couple of weeks the hospice social worker left me a message like this: “We had a wonderful visit today. I held her hand and we listened to music. She watched me with those beautiful green eyes and I felt that she was really with me.”


I learned to do that myself and be satisfied. This new way saw us through to the end. My daughter and I were present, my son on the phone. We had music, and the hospice nurse whispered a message into her ear. “Go Jessie, and dance with Bob.”


Surprised, I found myself smiling. What a thought. We held her hands and soon she did, peacefully.


Almost right away, I began to regain memories of happier times and had an easy time recalling her backbone, her independent streak, how we’d collapse in laughter at the same oddball occurrences. It was as if I could finally detach from her ten-year decline and reclaim the whole of her. Again, the dreaded worst happened and comfort appeared. If only I’d known that from the start.


CBH 06/10

DANGEROUS ROMANCE

NARROW ESCAPES - Wherever there is danger, there lurks opportunity; whenever there is opportunity, there lurks danger. The two are inseparable. They go together. ~ Earl Nightingale

Have you ever been seduced by a house, or in the case of this tale, a townhouse? When I fell in love with it, it didn’t even exist. It’s the way a lot of romances begin, with a vision of something that isn’t really there.

It was shingle-style, with stone foundation and two porches, one screened in. It was roomy for a townhouse, meaning I wouldn’t have had to get rid of any of my lifetime accumulation of furniture I’m apparently not done with yet. The English basement even had room for the pool table and the juke box.

The sales team had it conjured on a full-wall video mural depicting the full sweep of the new neighborhood, to be constructed on the site of a recently leveled downtrodden apartment development. The sales office stood on an adjacent property, accessible via a circuitous route involving three left turns.

As sales teams should be, this group was bursting with predictions - the units would be snapped up in a flash, several people had already put down deposits, the building would commence in accordance with the speed of the closings. It would start with the first row of townhouses and the first condo building, close to the elegant entrance, so new residents would not have to drive through a construction zone while the rest were completed. The landscaping would be done right away, not to worry.

I went home clutching gorgeous brochures and memories of the quality cabinet and hardware options. I could just imagine the sunlight streaming in through the bay window in the breakfast area. It reminded me of the house in the movie with Diane Keaton I can never remember the name of where Jack Nicholson recovers from a heart attack or something at her fantastic seaside house. (Remember? He is dating her nubile young daughter which pretty much turns your stomach so imagine how the Diane Keaton character must have felt, but came around to falling in love with her [Diane] instead.) Something’s Gotta Give, that’s it.

See? That’s where the fantasy took over. I floated through the next few days, researching the developer, visiting their other properties, imagining the cleansing process of a move for the first time in 15 years, and dreaming of my new life with no landscaping bills.

My husband sobered up first - why would we want to live in a construction site? The floor plan was awkward and the entryway a disaster - come in the front door and three feet later you have to climb up or down to get to the living space. How would his dad in his wheelchair ever visit?

Oh, good point. Is there room for an elevator, we asked the bright sales lady. Well yes, she stammered, if you give up a chunk of the kitchen, and a bedroom, and the bar in the basement.

Hmm. The dream started to fade. Also influential, the consideration of whether to commit before selling our current house, which wasn’t hard to decide since we’d once owned two houses for a spell and swore to learn from our mistake. The brakes engaged. We told them no the next time they called, crushing their dreams, and mine.

I used to drive by sometimes, watching the project begin. True to their word, they started with the two buildings they’d promised, and the gate looked great. The recession was starting to show itself though and I noticed that the newspaper ads that used to feature snob appeal of living in the village, now took on a budget tinge - townhouses for only $700,000, condos in the $300,000s. Wait, weren’t they vastly more expensive than that when we looked; where were those brochures?

The recession won, the salesladies are long gone, their sales office still perched above a vast empty parking lot. There is a leaning chain link fence around the whole property with No Trespassing signs every six feet. Giant puddles collect in the unpaved streets. Piles of building materials dot the property, stacks of concrete curbs, concrete blocks, and stones. Lengths of giant sewer pipe rest against rolling hills of dirt with new grass poking through straw. A mountain of landscaping boulders sits near the entrance. A lone trash container sits imprisoned behind the fence.

It reminds me of Pompeii, life frozen in the moment of disaster. But now life is taking over again - the grass, dozens of birds chirp crazily because it’s finally spring. A neighbor walks her dog through the one paved street that leads from the sales office to the gate. The two buildings sit, stickers on each window, paused just before happy people were to move into their new lives.

Except for the first townhouse of the four. It’s the unit we picked out - for best sunlight both morning and evening, best view of the treed neighborhood behind, in view of the community gazebo. In that unit, the stickers are off the windows, Venetian blinds and shutters are up, and the porch light is on. Two cars sit out back alongside a basketball hoop. An urn holds flowers. Someone is living in our unit, carrying on life in the middle, well really at the edge of, the stalled construction site. They have a very short ride until they are out on the street driving past the construction sign no one ever took down that promises access to the office and exciting deals 11-6 every day.

Narrow escape? Yes, except for one family who may feel foolish, or unlucky, or philosophical, depending on who and how they are. Give them credit for pulling the trigger on their new life, even if it didn’t turn out quite as they expected. A little part of me still longs for the new start, the sun in the morning and all that. It looks cozy in there in the rain, a good place to read a book. Looking too closely feels a little dangerous, like looking back at an old boyfriend and wondering, even when you know better. Thank goodness you snapped out of it, but the dream lingers, of how things might have been.

CBH 05/10