Movie Night, Romance and Selfishness

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society is a movie coming up for our Friday Movie Night here on the CC campus. I read the book and loved it so I can’t wait to see this movie. I’m going to like movie nights here. It’s a chance to discuss films in real time with real people. Something I’ve been craving in recent years: people around when I want them but solitude and plenty of places to enjoy it when I need it. 

Last week they showed the movie The Radium Girls which was based on a true story of girls who worked in a watch factory. They painted the numbers on the dials with glow-in-the-dark radium and died from being told to lick their brushes to bring them to a fine point after dipping them into the radium. This was in the same time frame when scientists wore lead shields and heavy gloves to handle the stuff. The company knew it was poisonous but hired a so-called company doctor to claim the girls who got sick all had syphilis, knowing back in the ‘20s they’d be too embarrassed to talk about their illness. 

As I was leaving the movie to walk back to my building my favorite security guard and I got into a discussion about labor protection laws and the history of the coal mines. He's taking a class that covered the sit-down strikes and I shared my grandfather's first-hand story of being in one of those strikes when sharp shooters hired by the company massacred sitting strikers. We can thank labor unions for making our work environments safe and anyone who thinks they've outlived their usefulness doesn't know human nature well enough. 

Good employers makes any place better and everyone I've asked here at the CCC seems to enjoy their work environment including the cleaning woman. She’s got quite the love story to tell. She’s an immigrant from France and she met an American guy when she was in college decades ago. He went home and they became pen pals, both going on the marry other people, raised families, lost their spouses. All that time remaining pen pals. When he invited her State Side to attend a party in his honor, she came and never went back. They got married and if you read that in a romance book you’d think the storyline was far-fetched.

When I was in the floral business and servicing weddings for twenty years I used to collect how-they-met stories from all my brides. I loved those stories, even before I started reading romance books. Not to mention I was without a boyfriend half of those years, looking for my own Prince Charming so it was research of a practical sort. I don’t know what happened to that collection of handwritten notes in a spiral notebook. A lot of that happened after my husband’s massive stroke is a blur. Yada, yada, yada you know the rest of that chapter in my story, I've told it often enough. Now, I joke that I was Wonder Woman back then meaning it’s a wonder I didn’t have my own stroke from all the stress I was under. 

The point I'm trying to make it that's it's been a long road getting to a point in life where I virtually have no/few responsibilities and my desire to keep it that way probably just earned me a label I won't like. I turned down an invitation to work with two other x-florists living here to make Christmas decorations for all the public areas. One of the guys talked management out of hiring an outside company and put him in charge. I’d been avoiding him since learning that but he sent me an email asking me to join his planning session. I had no choice but to face my first real dilemma here and I wrote back: “I have zero interest in using what little time and creative energy I have left in life to revisit what I did for 20 years to earn a living...especially the Christmas rush.” I was too blunt, wasn't I. But I didn't want to get locked into a time consuming volunteer role for all the holidays on the calendar. I don't need the jerk circle.

Does that make me a selfish person? I feel selfish. It's flower arranging I'm turning down for crying out loud, not working to save endangered animals from extinction or to put an end to world hunger. So how come I feel like this? Would a softer worded email have made a difference? I'm getting better at turning down things I don't want to do but the feeling guilty part that comes after needs work.

But if there's one thing I've learned in my almost 80 years on earth is that we can't do it all. At my age I have to cut to the chase, do what makes me happy even if it's on a smaller scale than I'd dreamed of doing before life got in the way of my plans. I can no longer be another John Steinbeck or John Singer Sargent but I can be a wordy blogger who paints ugly brown barns in a class full of beginners. ©

Forging Ahead While Glancing Behind

Back in the days when I worked a lot of overtime hours around the holidays---Easter, Valentine’s Day, Memorial Day, Thanksgiving and Christmas---I’d get to work at 8 AM and didn’t leave the flower shop until 8 to 10 PM. With a quick lunch out of a sack and dinner brought in by the boss we never left our work stations. It was a wholesale/retail operation so holiday schedules dragged on for several weeks. Decades later when I worked for my husband we’d be out on parking lots plowing snow for long hours. And during a notable, record breaking blizzard we didn’t get out of our trucks for anything but bathroom and gassing up breaks for three days straight. We’d take turns sleeping in two hour shifts while slumped over in our seats. Where on earth did all my energy and stamina go since those days? 

The past two days I’ve had four things penciled in my day planner with three other events on tap for the end of the week and already I’m dog tired and wishing it was Sunday so I can sleep in. Monday it was to the dentist and The Gathering at the senior hall. As I drove the long trip to a dentist in another county south of town, I made a decision that I need to find one closer to home. Heck, I probably go past 100 others as I drive the dreaded S-curve through the city. I’ve known my dentist for forty years, before he even went to dental school. But on the way back home I made another decision to postpone the idea of leaving my tooth guy. Being around people who knew my husband and me before and after Don's stroke makes me feel good.

Though I have to admit at The Gathering (for people looking for friends) I came close to feeling that same way with some new acquaintances. A woman in the group who has an extensive background in dealing with deaf people got us all sharing our life experiences with disabilities. I was able to talk about my husband’s and my experience going to speech classes with future speech pathologists. For six years, two days a week, I sat behind a one way mirror with a college professor and her class as a series of student clinicians worked with my husband on the other side of the glass. Even though his vocabulary never got above twenty-five unprompted words), my husband often had all of us laughing so hard it was hard to stop and he could intone a single word in a dozen ways in an effort to be understood. The professors kept him at the college for so long because, they said, he taught their students to see their clients as more than just textbook language disorders; that real people with unique personalities are underneath the disability they’d be treating out in the field.

Most widows who were caregivers to our spouses have our battle scars and war stories to tell. Some fought the revolving doors of medical clinics and treatment changes. Some witnessed the slow decline of the mind and/or the body. We caregiver veterans recognize kindred spirits and we seem to bond over being “valued and understood” in that context. I was a daughter, a sibling, an artist, a wife, a florist, and a snowplower and people everywhere understand what those labels mean but somehow summarizing the last twelve years of life with Don up with the single word of “caregiver” seems like it lacks clarity to anyone who has not-been-there-done-that. One woman who was at The Gathering talked about how the local widows group helped her with that. I had been invited by mail to join that widow's group in my first year out from Don’s death, but going meant I’d have to go through the dreaded S-Curved after dark so I passed on the opportunity.

Tuesday I was back to the senior hall for the Matter of Balance class and a luncheon where a Korean violinist entertained us with Bach and a few hard rock pieces that he arranged himself. His talks in between sonatas (or whatever they’re called) made me wish I could find a music appreciation class. That guy could make his two hundred year old instrument sing and he had a wonderful sense of humor as he answered our many questions. Someone asked how long he'd been playing and he took out his phone and said, "About ten minutes." Someone else asked if he could play The Devil Went Down to Georgia and he answered that he can play it but he won’t, adding that all violinists hate getting that request. He didn't explain why but he did explain the differences between a fiddle and a violin—the same instrument held in a different way, one featuring finger work, the other featuring bow work. Being a long-time fan of blue-grass music it wasn’t much of a stretch for me to thoroughly appreciate this solo act. Lunch and a great floor show for $6.00. It doesn’t get much better than that and he made it worthwhile to be dog tired this week. ©

I love this two minute video with its upbeat message about love, death and looking at life. If anyone knows who this guy is, please clue me in. I should know but I've been drawing a blank for days.

Romance and the Power of Forgiveness

 

Someone made a comment on one of my blogs that it sounded like I was romantic in my younger days and I was thinking about that on the way to meet my Movie and Lunch Club yesterday. I was writing in my head how I would answer that, if I was inclined to explain how I happened to become a bridal consultant in the floral industry. It’s not what it looks like on the surface. I didn’t and still don’t go gaga over weddings, I wasn’t drawn to them like a bee to honey. It all came about because of my mother’s raging hormones when she was going through menopause. Her doctor told her she needed to get a job. That was his prescription, can you believe that? So off she went to work at a large wholesale greenhouse when I was 12 or 13 and suffering from my own raging hormones. My poor father, what he must have gone through back then.

Fast forward a few years and one holiday the greenhouse wanted some teenagers to come help out with the rush. Entry me. I worked there all through high school and my first three years of college. One of owners was a crusty old man that a lot of workers were afraid of and they didn’t stay around. Not me. He liked my work ethic and I liked the challenge of keeping up with his barking orders. It was like a game to me and with my interest in art, I was good at the game we were “playing” which at that time was dressing holiday plants and making planters that were shipped out by the hundreds to places in five states. And in between wholesale orders, I was a ‘runner’ for the floral designers in the retail division. Thus when I dropped out of college at the end of my third year of college and needed a full time job I didn’t have to look hard to get an offer. And that is how I ended up spending two summers at floral design school, the second year for advanced wedding design.

I had all this on my mind when I sat down in the movie theater. I hadn’t read any of the reviews of the film we were seeing so I had no idea what The Railway Man would be about. It started out with a chance meeting on a train of a couple and when the lead character, Eric, asked Pattie: “Are you romantic?” I thought, Ohmygod, it’s a sign! I really DO need to write about this question! I was thinking the movie was going to be a romantic comedy. I couldn’t have been more wrong.  

For the next 116 minutes I couldn’t take my eyes off the screen. The film is about a true story of prisoners of WWII who were tortured in a Japanese labor camp while building the notorious Thai/Burma Railroad. Eric had been traumatized and shut down emotionally for years because of his experiences and the story was told through a series of flashbacks after he and Pattie were married. She was determined to help him put his demons to rest and when the news came that his veteran’s group had tracked down the prison’s camp interpreter---who the prisoners hated and blamed the most for their torture---Pattie encouraged Eric to go confront his tormentor. The guy was a guide at the former work camp that had since been turned into a museum. So Eric packed a knife fully intending to kill the guy and extract vengeance but instead---spoiler alert---they ended up becoming good friends. It’s a true story about the power of forgiveness, but in a way it’s also a love story about a woman who believed so much in the goodness of the man she married that she was willing to do whatever was necessary to help him make peace with his horrible past, and a story about a man who loved a woman so much that he was willing to finally put his past behind him to hold on to her. But the "love story" part of the film only took up about 6 of 116 minutes so don't go expecting much romance on the screen. It won't be there.

Needless to say, I liked the movie. I like films that make you think and that are based on actual events. The atrocities of war are hard to watch but I feel strongly that we need to bear witness to them IF they are presented in a responsible way and not just showing violence gratuitously. I had similar feelings about watching the opening ceremony of the 911 museum this week. I didn’t like having my emotion churned up by what I was seeing, but it was important for me to stay tuned in to it---to honor those who suffered and are still suffering. And often times you can get glimpses of hope seeing ceremonies and movies of this kind and I am stuck by the resilience of human beings. That people can go through that kind of stuff and come out the other side finding that all import power of forgiveness that lets them move forward is amazing. I guess I really am a romantic because I truly believe and hope that someday the powers in charge will throw a war and no one---NO ONE on either side---will show up to fight. ©

Letting Go of Our Ghosts

Levi, February 2013

I am so glad I don’t have to go outside in the winter and poop in the snow. Whoever invented indoor plumbing for humans should have a memorial built to them on Time Square. I thought about this while sitting in my warm, fuzzy bathrobe—the one that leaves pink dusty bunnies all over the house---and watching the dog outside in eight inches of snow looking for the perfect place to do his duty. What makes one place better than another I don’t know but Levi has a peculiar cat-like behavior of using his nose to push snow over his poop that is even harder to understand. Sometimes I think he doesn’t want me to find it because he suspects I’m the one stealing it when he’s not looking.

When I was younger I was a self-employed florist specializing in wedding flowers and I always worried about being a bag lady when I got too old to work. That emotional roller coaster is no longer on my worry plate but when I watch the dog outside in the winter I often think about the street people who live out in the elements. I can’t even stand the cold of winter while waiting at the door for the dog to come inside. I can’t imagine living in a cardboard box under a bridge. One of the things that made me fall in love with Don all those years ago is how generous he was with donating to our local mission and soup kitchen and that never changed over the years.

In our early years together Don didn’t just mail checks off to the soup kitchen, he’d often hand deliver them. Back in those days he had a gaggle of teens that worked for him in the summers doing asphalt resurfacing and patching. As teenaged boys go they often thought their lives were tougher than they really were. “My mom’s making me work for my own spending money!” Boohoo. So Don would make sure which every kid needed a reality check was in the truck when he’d drop off a donation to the soup kitchen and he’d make sure he’d do it while the street people were lined up outside the door waiting to get their only hot meal of the day. He’d pull right up to the front door and leave the boys in the truck while he walked around back to find the director of the charity. It was an uncomfortable place for the boys to wait while getting their first exposure to inner city, homeless people who really did have it tough. The conversations back to our side of town were what we called his “fifteen with father” teaching times. Don and I never had children but he never passed up an opportunity to teach the kids around him something about life. Never condensing or lecturing, always man to “man” with respect for their opinions but finding a way that got through their teenaged bravado and naivety.

We all leave our marks on the world in big and small ways…some good, some bad. Some of those marks are known to those around us but some are obscure even to those who thought they knew our spouses well---or think we know our own impact on the world, but really don’t have a clue to its extend. The trick is to get through life with more check marks in the ‘good’ column than the other. When a spouse dies we spend inordinate amount of time adding up all those big and small ways our loved one touched our world and the world at-large. We can’t help it. We want their lives to mean something, to count for more than just a stone in a cemetery and images in photographs. So we become accountants making sure we’ve cataloged everything in their ledger book before we can let go of our ghosts and the past that haunts us. It’s an unselfish act---letting go. Some of us want to hold on forever but we know we can’t. We let go of the past because we owe it to our families and ourselves to work at exchanging the pain of loss for the peace of acceptance---the loneliness of lost love for the solitude of knowing we had it in the first place. And because we still have marks to make in our own ledger books. ©

“Sometimes the hardest part isn't letting go but rather learning to start over.”

Nicole Sobon