Profiles and Secrets

It’s one of those do or die days where I have to sit here at the computer until something falls out of my brain that’s halfway worthy of writing down. I not only have a blog post to write for next week but I also have a piece to write for my creative writing group. I’d truly like to quit the writing group but it’s not big enough to survive without me and the others in the group seem to get a lot out of our band of merry scribes. When I first started the group I thought I could kill two birds with one stone---look at me using that tired, old metaphor---and write essays that could serve double duty, but that didn’t work out. No one here knows I keep a blog and since people living on my continuum care campus are often the subject of my blog posts I want to keep it that way. The bottom line is I can’t read my posts here in my writing group. And I seem to be fresh out of poems, after writing twelve about my campus.

A few days ago I was asked to write a profile for our campus newsletter. It’s a by-monthly publication short on content but it’s put together by two retired graphic artists turned college professors. What it lacks in quantity it makes up for in quality. It’s a full color newsletter printed on slick, shiny paper and is full of lots of photos. It also features two profiles of residents and each profile is written by the person being featured. “So it will be your voice, sharing what others might not know about you,” I was told. What a daunting task for someone who keeps so many secrets from my neighbors! In the past, the newsletter has printed three of the above mentioned poems. Submitted by invitation and they were well received if you can judge such things by the comments others made after they were printed. But a profile? I wrote and submitted it before I could chicken out because it’s so different than any of the other profiles printed in the past. Most people, for example, have listed where they went to college, their job titles, the number of children and grandchildren or their travel experiences, places they've lived, etc. etc.

Here is what I wrote and you might recognized a few lines borrowed from the top of this blog: 

“When I was asked to write a profile for Insight in 200 words or less my first thought was how can I do that without sounding like I’m writing a profile for a dating app? “Woman, widow, senior citizen seeking to live out my days with a sense of whimsy as I search for inner peace.” Yup, that sums up where I’m at in life right now, having lost my soul mate of 42 years a few years back. Life was good until it wasn’t when my husband had a massive stroke that left him right side paralyzed and with no verbal or written means of communication for the next 12 1/2 years and I transitioned into being his caregiver extraordinaire. For every Yin in life there is a Yang and my Yang came in the form of me becoming a mentor, a chat room host and an administrator on a large website in the stroke community, eventually taking a seat on the Board of Directors. I’m no longer active or associated there, but I still spend my mornings living in cyber space.

“Along with the invitation to write a profile came a list of questions and one was about hobbies and collections. It’s safe to say that I’ve tried every craft and hobby that’s crossed my path, with creative writing staying on the list the longest and Mahjong being the newest hobby added. My most unusual collection? A large jar full of every single watch I’ve ever owned including a sundial watch that only works on sunny days." ©

What do you think? Did I manage to write a profile that still left my secrets intact? The biggest secret of all is my online life in the blog community followed up by the fact that while my husband and I were soul mates for 42 years we didn’t get married until after his stroke. I know from a book club discussion that few people here in the land of long marriages would understand why we didn’t get married sooner rather than later. And the explanation is too complicated and would reveal too many personal facts that I’m not willing to put into the gossip mill around here. Even my path to getting a college degree was not in a straight line and just listing the place where I got it doesn’t begin to express how proud I was to finally get the degree 25 years after I started working on it. 

Well, I managed to knock out a blog post, Now I have to work on April’s writing prompt for my writing group’s meet-up on Thursday. It’s a tough one: “Until that moment, she hadn’t realized the past can change.” Each month we plan to draw a prompt out of an envelope based on the Ten Word Stories we wrote in January. Our first writing prompt bought some great results---all vastly different. This one is frying my brain. Wish me luck!

Until next Wednesday.  ©

The Bacon Edition and More Newbies on Campus

When I sit down to write a new post I quite often do a search of my blog to make sure I won’t be repeating myself. This blog goes back to 2012 and my life experiences aren’t that broad that I’ve still got a lot of untold stories left---even less than when I started because I’m old and my memories are fading. Today I used the search term ‘bacon’ and I’ll explain why later on. 

One of the first posts I found was written in 2014 titled The Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon and it started out, “I’m having a hard time deciding if I have anything left to say that hasn’t been said in a million different ways about the topics I usually write about.” Do you see a pattern here? And I went on: “I need a new life! Either that or I need to start making stuff up…like fictitious trips to the Amazon---the river not the online store. I’ve been to Amazon.com more times than I care to admit and while I enjoy shopping there no one cares where I get my books and finger puppets. Note to my heirs: those plush little puppets would make great places to hide things. Be sure to check the panda’s butt when I die.” It might contain the password you’ve been looking for.

My search of posts where I mentioned ‘bacon’ was surprisingly long and I quit counting at fifteen. I skim-read through a few looking for what I hoped I wouldn’t find (and didn’t). Those I read ranged in topic from different things to put on peanut butter sandwiches to snacks my dog loved to freezing bacon. Since it’s been awhile I’ll repeat that handy little freezing tip: The idea of rolling your bacon one piece at a time (see photo above) came from a Food Network Magazine article. You freeze them not touching each other, then put them in a covered container so you can defrost one or two pieces at a time which takes about 6-7 minutes. I have a microwave bacon baking dish which is the only way I’ll cook it. And that leads into why I was searching to see if I’ve ever written about my fear of frying bacon in preticular and frying foods in general.

After the anniversary party that I wrote about in my last post a woman who is well known around here for being a prolific and great cook (and a ride-or-die Trump supporter) asked me to come to her apartment because she had some party leftovers to give to me. While I was there she wanted to know my background, how I got through life without much experience in the culinary field. I blamed it on my mother, of course, and told her about the day she left me unsupervised while trying to fry bacon when I was 12 or 13 and how I got splatter burned on my face, eyeball and neck. After that I refused to fry ANYTHING until I turned 75 and I happened on an issue of the Food Network that was entirely devoted to cooking bacon. (See why my mom called me stubborn?) I read that issue cover to cover and challenged myself to get over my fear of cooking bacon. I followed the directions faithfully and made a perfect batch of bacon then I decided never to do it again. 1) I’d conquered my fear, 2) I didn’t like the cleanup for just one person, and 3) I proved what I used to tell my mom when she’d nagged me about not learning my way around the kitchen. I’d tell her, “If you can read you learn to cook and when I need to learn, I will...” That probably worried her even more because she knew I was a poor reader.  

“How are you ever going to get a husband if you can’t cook?” my mom would ask and I’d reply, “I’ll find one who can afford to go to restaurants or who likes to cook like Jerry (my brother) does.” My brother enjoyed the lessons meant for me---if I’d been paying attention---and to this day he claims I would have starved to death if he hadn’t made the dinners after school when my mom went back to work. To the woman who gave me the leftovers I also explained that before my husband and I were married we lived two miles apart with a dozen or so restaurants in between. He worked nights and I worked days so we’d meet in the middle for lunch. Occasionally on the weekends I'd grill steaks and I could make a good pot roast. And without having kids to feed it just worked for us.

Change of topic: I’ve got six new residents on campus and two of them overlook my deck, a couple and their large poodle named Willie. I don’t know them enough to give them nicknames yet but already I like them for two reasons: 1) I like people who give their pets human names and 2) news on the grape vine is they turned their den in an art studio for the wife. I met her briefly and have seen her twice. She likes to draw mostly and both times I saw her picking up mail she was wearing a painter’s smock and hat like the French painters in the 20^th century. She looked so cute and all she needs is to carry a paint brush around to really look authentic. The royal blue silk blouse I wore to the recent anniversary party was fashioned after those painter’s smocks which is why I bought for the opening of the student art show I was in. 

Something tells me the next time we have a Paint and Sip party around here my painting will have some stiff competition. Great! I’ve always worked best in classes with people who I can learn from and try to compete with. It's like if you were to run a race against people who are 10-15 years older than you, you'd probably win every time but if you run with people who are younger than you, you probably wouldn't win but your time would be faster. That's me in art classes. I run better, so to speak, when I'm trying to keep up rather than 'teach by example' to those around me who've never held a paint brush.

Speaking of creativity, our Creative Writing Group is still a small but tightly net group of four and the round-robin story we’ve been writing is turning it to something we’re all proud of. We’re talking about doing a reading of it some evening by the fireplace, after the holidays with each of us reading the parts we wrote. Nights by the fireplace are things the residents---not our Enrichment Director---put together and they are usually music related stuff that draw 15 or 20 people. But one resident's family did do a poetry slam once. It would be scary to stand up and read our round robin but as Eleanor Roosevelt once said: “Do something that scares you every day” and she wasn’t talking about watching scary movies or doing dare-devil stunts. She was talking about going outside of your comfort zone. 

I have zero experience talking in front of groups since college in the '60s when I was a second stringer on a debate team. Two others in my group do public speaking with their church work and the third member of our group was a high school teacher/librarian and she doesn't fear public speaking. She and the only guy are brand new to creative writing, though, so it will be scary for them to reveal their wordsmithing in public. We all have tried our hand at poetry so we’re debating between doing this reading and doing a poetry slam that we can invite others to join in with original poems of their own. Decisions. Decisions!

Until next Wednesday. ©

* Photo credits: Bacon taken by me. The portrait photo was napped off Roseberys Art Auction site and was listed as '20th Century French School.'

Our Amazing Creative Writing Session

Our third meeting of the writing group here on the Continuum Care Campus was amazing. We had five people show up and that included Chatty Cathy who claims she just took dictations from God to write the songs she did before she had a series of strokes. She actually wrote a poem on the spot about something in another woman’s essay and it blew my mind how fast Chatty Cathy came up with what she did. No wonder she thinks there’s something mystical about her writing process. If she keeps coming---she missed the second meeting---it’s going to be a lesson in patience and tolerance for the rest of us, though, because like a lot of stroke survivors with damage to the frontal lobe part of the brain she has no impulse control, talks non-stop---often about God---and usually not on topic.

When Ms Angel---who wrote about her husband’s suicide and the letter he left behind where he confessed to a secret life---read the last line of her essay there was silence for a moment from three of us who were awestruck before Chatty Cathy started in about something totally unrelated. The former librarian and high school teacher in our group grabbed Cathy’s hand, squeezed it hard which made her stop talking mid-sentence and then The Librarian gave some appropriate feedback and I swear there were tears threatening to roll down her cheeks.

Ms Angel is an accomplished writer, had a newspaper column about religion for over three decades and I used to read her during my searching for the meaning of life era. And I’ve said it before when I wrote about us meeting on a bus over the summer that we had an instant connection---I think in part because Ms Angel reminds me of my do-good cousin. They both work/ed for the church, both have the same voice quality and the same physical stature, eyes and hair coloring. Both would do anything for someone in need and they make the world a better place just by being themselves. I used to joke that I was glad I didn’t live next door to my cousin because she would have had me volunteering for all kinds of do-good projects and I wouldn't have the energy to keep up. 

I admire and like Ms Angel even though we are so different. I knew about her husband's suicide before she sat across the table in writing group and bared her soul about the worse day of her life. She found a way to end her essay in an upbeat way that shocked me and it shouldn’t have. It was a classic example of how a person’s religion gave her peace during a terrible time. When I was a mentor in the stroke community I saw lots of examples of angry people turning away from their God who, in their eyes, should have protected them from having the rug pulled out from under them, where Ms Angel saw her God as giving her the tools to get through her pain.

Mr. Graphic Artist was also in attendance and you may remember he hadn’t written anything since moving in and he had visualized spending his time here at the CCC writing full time which didn't happen. But since I started the group he's been working on poetry and this past month he was prolific. He brought a dozen short poems to read plus another from a book written by a pastor. He loaned the book to Ms Angel since it was poetry about near-death confessions and he thought she’d be able to relate to it having heard many of them in her work here with Hospice residents. The Librarian last time brought twenty pages of a book she was working on to read but this time she brought a one page poem that was pretty neat. It was a good thing, however, that she and Mr. Artist read their stuff before the powerful essay on the suicide was shared.

I read last and I brought two pieces but I only shared the essay about my childhood friend's dying recently that I posted here in my blog. I was glad I brought it because anything frivolous read after the suicide essay would have been bridge too far to go emotional for most of us or it would have fallen flat like the poem I didn't read about a sing-along birthday party here on campus. I also brought my copy of A Year of Writing Dangerously: 356 Days of Inspiration and Encouragement and quite by serendipity I had marked a page about baring one's soul. Reading it was the perfect way to end our meeting.

Since Chatty Cathy hadn't written anything new in a few years---except the poem written on the fly in group---we gave her an assignment. We suggested that she write about her stroke and how it changed her life. I’m trying really hard not to let my annoyance of this woman show. Others here on campus avoid sitting next to her at lectures, meals and parties but that isn't possible around a table of five. I know she can’t help her non-stop talking and I’m going to have to research ways to handle that kind of brain damage in stroke survivors. Grabbing her hand and squeezing it tight to make her stop talking won’t work for germaphobic me the way it did for The Librarian and it was exactly what was needed doing in that moment of time.  

All and all I was happy with our third group even if Chatty Cathy makes it feel like I'm walking in a mine field. How do we balance not hurting her feelings with the sense that she's wasting everyone's time if we don't interrupt her to give others their time for feedback? If we didn't cut her off she'd literally talk the whole session away. When my husband was in speech therapy after his stroke I learned techniques that helped with his non-verbal impulse control issues but as a family member, a caregiver or a speech pathologist you can redirect and say things you can't say or do in a group of random people gathered for whatever. 

That kind of research is what one side of me wants to do while the other side doesn't want to get back in the saddle---so to speak---where a stroke is taking me to a place I don't want to go again. Why do I have to have these selfish thoughts when faced with a dilemma like this when others like Ms Angel and my cousin seem to be able to let their compassion for others be their first and only responses? The best I can do is show compassion on the outside while having selfish thoughts on the inside and hoping that I'm a good enough actress to pull it off. ©

Living the Entitled Life

What is wrong with people? What is wrong with me? Don’t answer that just yet because I’m going on a rant and I’ll give you my opinion on the matter first, then it's your turn. The other day I happened to sit next to a guy on campus who I try to avoid and I’ve been doing an excellence job of it until now…nearly a whole year since he first told me on an elevator that Covid would be gone as soon as the Democrats are out of office because they made the whole thing up. That was his excuse for not following the mask mandate that my continuum care complex had for all public places at the time.

He thinks we’re friends now because he joined the creative writing group and because he wrote a self-published book and I said some nice things about it. Sincere things because I don’t care if a 350 page book is vanity press it truly is an accomplishment and a commitment to put that many words downs on paper, sent them off to a printer and be able to hold the results in your hands. It’s an autobiography with a very impressive sepia tone front cover photo that makes him look like a Founding Father with his neatly trimmed white beard and stately posture, and he’s donated a copy to our campus library. He hired an editor to correct punctuation and spelling but not to touch the content. I found this out because he said when he gave a copy to a friend to read the friend reported back that Mr. DNR (department of natural resources) told the same story seven times in his book and I remarked that a good editor should have caught that. “Oh, no,” he replied, “it cost more to have the editor work on the content. I got the punctuation and spelling package only.” I didn’t say it but I’m thinking that editing out that much duplicated material would have dropped the printing costs down enough to offset the content editing service package. 

As we sat next to one another the topic of fishing came up---we were eating it at the time---and how he thinks it’s a crime that the Native Americans have exclusive rights to fish for a certain species of fish in the Great Lakes and they are using commercial fishing boats with huge nets---all because of a treaty written back in the 1800s. “They should be making them fish with canoes and dipping nets like they did back in the 1800s when the treaty was signed!” 

This guy is a NRA super supporter, a Trump Maga Republican and he put up a terrible fuss when he found out this place is a gun free campus. His Second Amendment rights gives him the right to move a cruise missile into his apartment if he wants one, he said, and “You’d all be happy I have my guns if a mass shooter tries to charge the place! I could pick him off from my balcony.” This conversation took place back before this complex was even built, at one of their marketing parties and the sales manager offered to give him and his wife back their deposit because the no guns rule is firm: he and his gun collection could not move in. Mr. DNR claims he gave all his guns to his sons to comply but I doubt that. I remembered all this when the guy mentioned the canoes and dipping nets and I wanted to ask him is he believed the Second Amendment should limit gun owners to musket and balls type guns like they had back when the Constitution was written. But I didn’t ask. We were eating dinner and it wasn’t a situation where either one of us could walk away. 

I told myself after the first creative writing session that I’d try to be open-minded about this guy but at dinner he told me he’s dropping out of the group because of Chatty Cathy---the song writer. “She interrupted me several times and others, too, and I can’t abide that.” “I know,” I replied, “I think she might have impulse control issues because of the stroke she had” and he said, “I don’t believe that. You could see she wasn’t paying attention. She was thinking about what she wanted to say next.” He told me to let him know if she drops out and then he’ll come back. "I will," I told him but in the back of my petty little mind I was cheering the fact that I won’t have to play nice with a Maga Republican in the creative writing group.

I said at the beginning I was going to rant out an answer to what is wrong with people and I guess I should keep my word. What is wrong with people is we can justify illogical thinking when it benefits us personally. And this guy’s attitude regarding the fishing rights of Native Americans vs his own right to own any kind of modern weaponry he wants is a perfect example of living an entitled life where the rules of logic and ethics are applied unevenly to serve the selfishness of oneself. And to serve my own selfishness I lied when I promised to call him if Chatty Cathy bails out of the Creative Writing Group. I was so happy I was afraid I wouldn't be able to keep the smile off my face.   ©

 * photo from the GLIFWC website