Leaving Time...or is it Time to Leave?

Have you read Leaving Time by Jodi Picoult? I probably shouldn’t be discussing the book in public on the chance that someone reading this has it sitting in their to-read stack. But I can’t help it. I just finished it last night and book club is a week away and I want to sort out my reactions to it. I read a few reviews this morning to see how they handled the plot twist in the last forth of the book and none of them gave away the fact that---spoiler alert!---the characters you think are alive are actually ghosts and the character/s you think are dead are not. For most of the book you think you’re reading an interesting mystery of sorts about a 13 year old girl who wants to find out why her mother ran off ten years ago and she gets a down-and-out private detective and a has-been TV psychic to help her.

The story line of the book takes place mostly at an elephant sanctuary and the mother was a researcher studying the grieving habits of elephants. I love elephants. I mean I REALLY love them! I have an elephant bell sitting four feet away from me as I type. I follow the Elephant Listening Project on Facebook. I donate to elephant causes so I was racing through this book like it was on fire. All the main characters were extremely interesting…until the big reveal and then I felt let down, disappointed. Cheated. I wanted a happy ending, not one that opens up a bigger can of worms to sort out. Jodi Picoult is a good writer and her research about the elephants was spot on and, sure, the mystery got solved by the end of the book. BUT I don’t believe in ghosts. At least 95% of me doesn’t believe in ghosts. Jodi via way of the psychic character had some interesting things to say about our after-lives for lack of a better way to describe the supposed spirits milling around our space after leaving our time.

After closing the book last night I said out loud, “Okay, Don, if you’re a ghost you’d better come by and haunt me tonight.” And he did! It wasn’t a pleasant dream that made me wake up smiling and trying to hold on to that haziness as long as possible. Nope. I woke up in a panic. I’d been running from an elephant chasing me and Don was on a motorcycle behind the elephant driving him to me. I remember my dreams often enough that I have the dream dictionary bookmarked on my computer and this is what I found: “Dreaming of an elephant coming towards you at an unstoppable speed means that you are going to face a situation that you cannot control. You have to let things be and wish that it will all work out in the end.” I’m guessing the “situation I can’t control” is the fact that I’m going to die one day and I’m really not in the mood to go any time soon. And I don’t even want to guess why I dreamed that Don was herding the elephant in my direction. 

Change of topic: The next morning I loaded up the back of my Chevy Trax with things left over from my recent redecorating project. I had so much stuff the back bumper was dragging on the ground. A slight exaggeration, but it was a big load that included eight sets of sheets for twin beds. I had sets in red, black, and gray---prints, solids, flannel and jersey. I didn’t even know I had so many sets stuck on the top shelf of my closet. I also took a whole trash bag full of towels sets in the same colors and two boxes full of stuff I knew if I didn’t get them out of the house right away, I’d be tempted to keep them in the garage until they grew roots. I set aside all the framed photographs I had in my bedroom with plans to hang them on the pegboard wall in the garage where my husband’s collection of gas station memorabilia was displayed. Why not? These are my people. I’ll see them more often in the garage than I will if I un-frame them and put the photos in albums.

After dropping off my loot at Goodwill I headed north five miles to the tourist town where my husband grew up and my Mad Hatters Society sisters meet the first Wednesday of every month. But I was a half hour early so I back-tracked a couple of blocks to make an early visit at the cemetery---I usually don't go until May. I had dug the sod out around Don’s tombstone last fall and I was surprised to see the ‘ditch’ filled up with pine cones and pine needles still attached to small branches. Holy crap, that pine sap is sticky! I’d forgotten about that. It was a common childhood curse at the cottage where we kids played cowboys and Indians in the woods behind the lake. Back then, mom used gasoline to get pine pitch off our skin and out of our hair. I wasn’t about to try to get some gas out of my Chevy Trax so I tried the only liquid I had in the car besides water---Windex. To my shock, it took the pine sap off my fingers.

When I left the cemetery I told my husband---just in case he does happen to be a ghost and was hanging around---that I’m not speaking to him until he apologizes for trying to get me trampled by an elephant which, by the way, is how someone in the Leaving Time book died. But for a while, you're really not sure which character it was who got her head crushed under the elephant's foot. ©

From Doctor’s Bills to Elephant Bells

I got a bill from the doctor’s office for the first time I saw his nurse practitioner about at my Popeye’s Elbow. $39.00 for the clinic visit and after the “Medicare Insurance Adjustment” the grand total came to $107.43. What the heck? Insurance adjustments are supposed to lower your bill, not raise them by $68.43. I called their billing service and was told that Medicare likes to help you get to your deductible faster. “By making me pay for services I’m not getting? That makes no sense what so ever!” I told her. “I know,” she replied. “You’ll have to call Medicare for a more comprehensive explanation. We can't do anything about it.” Medicare takes forever and a day to send out their Summary Notices but when it gets here you can bet your grocery money that I’ll be calling about that $68.43 “adjustment.” In the meantime I was told I should pay the bill in full. It’s been years since I’ve racked up enough doctor appointments in a calendar year to satisfy my Medicare deductible before November. And I like it that way because that means I haven’t been sick. What a crazy, stupid change in Medicare if it pans out not to be a mistake. What if I didn’t have an extra seventy bucks to throw around on something I didn’t get?

The next day I got another bill from the doctor’s office, this time for $52.00 and after the “Medicare Insurance Adjustment” it was reduced down to $43.39. I called again. I was told the first bill was for the use of the clinic room, the second was for the services of the nurse practitioner. I used the bathroom while I was there so I'm surprised I didn't get billed for a toilet paper and flushing fee! 

Service people saw the surly side of me this week. My irrigation company called two weeks ago and wanted to come out this week Wednesday to turn my system on and fix any heads that winter may have damaged. Great, I could be home then but the scheduler couldn’t give me a window of time they’d be here. “I’ll let you know later,” he promised. He didn't. Tuesday morning I called him and asked if he could give me a window for the next day. “I’ll call you after six when I have the route set,” he said. I replied---and not too nicely, I might add---that I liked their old system better. “What was the old system?” he asked and I told him that the guy who did his job for years before he took it over always gave us a window of three hours in the same phone call when he’d set the date. “I can do that when I call tonight.” “A lot of good that does,” I snapped, “when I’ve had to keep the entire day open for two weeks waiting for you to call with a time!” Fortunately, the young guy who showed up to do the work was a sweetie pie and I didn’t give him a lick of surly or sass. 

Thursday the tide was about to change. When I came out of the grocery store I loaded my bounty into the car, hopped in the driver’s seat and hopped back out to take a sheet of notebook paper off my windshield. In block print, no punctuation or capitalization---a sure sign the writer was under thirty---were the words, “have a happy day” followed by a happy face drawing. I looked around and of course no one was around to see me smile. Then a cynical thought crossed my mind. Maybe someone scratched or dented my car and he/she left that note because someone saw it happen and the note writer was pretending to leave their contact information. I walked around the car, carefully eyeballing the gray metal and plastic. It was fine. I was truly the recipient of a random act of kindness. I kept the note and I’ll pass it on to another unsuspecting soul who will probably wear a silly smile all afternoon like I did---hopefully without my momentary cynical thought. 

Life was good again and it got better on Friday when I went to a lecture called, What Happens When You Tickle an Elephant's Toes? Crazy name but an interesting lecture about the Elephant Nature Park outside Chiang Mai in northern Thailand, which is a place where dozens of elephants live who’ve been abused and neglected. The woman giving the lecture took part in one of those volunteer programs where she paid to spend two weeks working at the sanctuary bathing, walking and feeding the elephants who live there. She’s a fascinating person. She works in a Search & Rescue K9 Unit and has been to over 40 countries. Her vacations are never your standard, hotel and tour bus kind of vacations. She finds these off the wall, ecotourism vacations that I’d never do but love hearing about. Why is it that some of us are doers and others, like me, are their cheerleaders? In my next life I want to be a doer who finds out firsthand that if you tickle an elephant’s toes they "laugh" just like we do and who learns that elephants are so smart they'll pack grass up inside the bells they wear around their necks to make them stop ringing when they play hide and seek with their Mahout. ©

NOTE: Ecotourism is defined as, “tourism directed toward exotic, often threatened, natural environments, especially to support conservation efforts and observe wildlife.” In other words you pay to work to make a difference for good causes.  Volunteer for Wildlife 

Photo at the top is of an elepant bell.

Blame my Mom – Elephants, Rocking Chairs and Rolling Libraries

One of the bad things about being a widow is we have no one to stage an intervention when our crazy or self-indulgent obsessions get carried away. When something grabs us we’re free as the wind to pursue it. One of the good things about being a widow is we have no one to stage an intervention when our crazy or self-indulgent obsessions get carried away. When something grabs us we’re free as the wind to purse it. Is that a dichotomy or what? I really don’t know. Am I using the word right? Is there a better one to describe how something can be both bad and good at the same time?

My most recent self-indulgent obsession has been binge-reading about African forest elephants and if a herd of them comes wandering through my yard here in Michigan this summer I’ll be ready for them. If they raise their curled trunks high in the air and spread their ears out perpendicular to their heads I’ll be hiding under the bed, knowing they were about to charge me. But the most fascinating thing I’ve learned is that elephants communicate with low-frequency rumblings that are below the hearing range of people. They can communicate this way over a hundred square miles and their favorite time to send messages is during the night when the atmosphere helps their rumblings travel farther. A researcher with Cornell University’s Listening Project, who is compiling an elephant dictionary, says they have identified and defined seventy distinct messages they send each other. Some of their messages can be felt by humans as vibrations in our diaphragms if we’re in the area and paying attention to our bodies. We can, of course, hear some of their vocalizations and trumpeting but the vast majority of their communication is infra-sound that can only be heard using special equipment that can triangulate the exact location of the elephant sending a message and the location of the elephant that replies back. Simply amazing.

I realize it might seem odd that a blog categorized as a widow’s blog is going on and on about elephants and I’ll only share one more story about them before I move on: They mourn their dead. As many as 300 elephants will line up and walk by the body of a dead pachyderm, vocalizing and touching it with their trunks and this can go on for days in the rain forest of central Africa, the funeral procession only ending when the head matriarch breaks away. Even after nature has reduced the carcass to a pile of bones the immediate family unit of that dead elephant comes to visit whenever they are in the area and they’ll fondle the bones---one was even observed for over an hour rocking a skull back and forth in her trunk and tears were running down her face. And some of the stories I’ve read on how a family unit works together in a circle to try to save a dying newborn can’t help but break your heart and make you realize the largest land mammals on earth are very much just like us.

I blame my mom for my wanting to share my binging on subjects that catch my attention. When I was in grade school I’d get home from school, settle on her lap and she’d say, “What did you learn today?” It was such a well ingrained habit that by the time I got too big to sit in her lap she’d still be the first person I’d want to tell if something new and exciting crossed my path at school. To this day when I see one of her two rocking chairs still in the family, I get a warm fuzzy feeling. She loved her rocking chairs and when she wasn’t rocking me, one of her cats or dogs or grand-kids she was reading.

After I met Don, I learned that he was just as interested in whatever I might have read as my mom was and he got my “book reports” like the one I shared up above. On vacations, he loved talking to the people he met along the way and I was content to stay in the motor home reading. When he’d get back in to drive the next leg of our trips we’d give each other “reports” on what we’d both just learned. One time out west he went into a gas station and didn’t come back out for several hours. After the first hour I went inside to check on him and there he was sitting with a group of locals around a pot-belly stove swapping stories and drinking coffee---his two favorite things to do. We traveled well together and I didn’t mind Don being Don, storyteller extraordinaire, as long as I didn’t run out of reading material. He lived life, I read about living a life. (I'm experiencing deja vu. If I wrote about Mom's rocking chair and/or the rolling library before, I apologize for repeating myself.)

With age comes wisdom, or so they say. To me it’s more like watching a 1,000 piece jigsaw puzzle coming together. We can see how all our life experiences come together to form the unique human beings we each become. With age and widowhood we have the time to reflect and apply our memories to explain away our idiosyncrasies. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it. ©

Elephants call Long-Distance After Hours 

The Elephant Listening Project 

The Elephant Whisperer: My Life with the Herd in the African Wild by Lawrence Anthony with Graham Spence