Bones, Books and Bathrobes

I’ve been a busy bee. I’ve had to because it’s March already and I still have winter goals that I haven’t accomplished. Snow is on the ground and its 19 degrees outside but Easter stuff is in the stores so that's a clear sign my window of time is closing. One of those goals was to get my husband’s speech therapy machine purged of all the personal stuff and out of the house. He died six years ago and I really should have done it long ago but after working on it this week---first to re-teach myself how to use the Lingraphica, then to purge over sixty storyboards I built for my husband---I can proudly say I’ve finally got the job done. Digging up bones is an emotionally task but all I have to do now it to wait for a nice spring day when I can take it out to the college’s speech pathology clinic where I’m donating it and they will pass it on to someone without insurance. The current version is smaller but the program itself hasn’t changed.

Storyboards consisted of pictures, words and voice-overs which my husband could use to practice saying words and doing speech class homework. Each storyboard illustrated sentences like: I had a stroke five years ago; I need to pee; my name is Don; can we go out to eat; I need the jock rash powder; I need help finding my wife; I don't feel well today; or Levi, Come! It’s a slick program with thousands, upon thousands of pictures in categories for everything and anything you can imagine. Purging storyboards one picture/word/voice-over at a time brought a few tears as I remembered my husband sitting at the dining room table parroting the machine while I made dinner. He never did get his unprompted vocabulary up above of a couple of dozen hard-earned nouns and the phrases, “Oh, boy!” and “Oh, Shit!” and “Oops!” But it wasn’t from lack of trying. Now, that particular section of Memory Lane no longer exists and there’s a sign posted where it used to begin that says, “He Never Gave up on Himself.” 

I just ordered a new book written by an author who is new to me but you might know him---Parker J. Palmer. He’s 80 years old and has written ten books. I found him by way of a Facebook meme with one of his poems. The poem was about reading one of his old journals and finding 50 blank pages followed by a page that said, “The void is filled with love.” When I got to that line in the poem, I had one of those moments that literally took my breath away. I’ve got journals like that where I abruptly quit writing and happy cycles explains the voids. One of the goals I had for this winter was to go through all those journals and diaries and finally let go of them. I haven’t done it yet but it’s moved up to second place on the list. Anyway, I went looking for information on Palmer and found he’s got a new book out ---On the Brink of Everything: Grace, Gravity and Getting Old.

I don’t know about you but when I buy books on Amazon I read a lot of the reader reviews. In the case of Palmer’s above mentioned book there were 183 reviews and 80 percent gave it five stars and seven percent gave it one star. Apparently he wrote some less than favorable stuff about Trump near the end that upset some of his fans thus the one star reviews. A four star reviewer wrote: “This book is a great invitation to philosophical, psychological, and spiritual reflection as we enter our senior years. Loved the author's wise and insightful narratives, poems, and quotes, as well as the narrator's voice. I could have done without the constant hammering of Berkeleyesque political ideas such as diversity, community organizing, and Americans' so-called white supremacy...” Anyone who could use the phrases “so-called white supremacy” and “spiritual reflection” in the same review peaked my interest enough to buy the book. He needs to do more spiritual reflection if he doubts that White Supremacists exist in America.

On his Amazon page Parker J. Palmer was quoted: “I don’t want to fight the gravity of aging. It’s nature’s way. I want to collaborate with it as best I can, in hopes of going down with something like the loveliness of that sunset. For all the wrinkles and worry lines, it’s a beautiful thing simply to be one of those who’s lived long enough to say, ‘I’m getting old.”

Oh. My. God! I want to look at my life that way. I want that loveliness of a sunset image stuck in my head to give me a look that says: I'm-at-peace-with-the-universe. Have you ever met someone who has that kind of glow coming from deep within? The Dalai Lama is the most famous person I know who has it. And if I wanted to end this post with an irreverent twist I'd say he's glowing because he gets to hide his pudgy body under flowing robes. I’d be happy, too, if I could do that. Robes Rule! And the next time I’m caught by a surprise visitor when it’s almost noon and I’m still in my bathrobe I’m going to plaster the Dalai Lama’s sowing-happiness-and-wisdom look on my face and avoid making an excuse or apologizing for my attire. ©

Photo at the top by Miranda Penn Turin; Dalai Lama and Archbishop Desmond Tutu

Blogging from Widowhood Lane

Last week my view counter ticked up to and over 150,000. Not bad for three years and I really wanted to do some sort of commemorative post thanking people who return to read from time to time. I guess I didn’t put it high enough on my priority list to follow through. Or maybe I held back from doing so because of something I wrote at the 100,000 mark. Along with thanking frequent readers, I bemoaning the fact that I get so few comments and I was rewarded with a snippy comment suggesting that I must be a comment whore. I replied back was that if I was writing just for the comments I would have quit a long time ago. To date, I’ve chalked up 1,494 comments. Does that really sound like I’m writing just for the feedback? I rest my case. I am not a comment whore even though I treasure each and every one I get. Thanks for asking, Snippy Lady. 

Why do bloggers blog? I read somewhere the blogging is dying out in favor of Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest and Instagram. I get that. I get that not everyone loves to write and at all those social media sources, short throw-away posts and comments are the accepted norm. I have accounts at all those places but I read far more than I post. Saying things in 120 characters is too darn hard for me at Twitter. Facebook I use mostly to keep up on what is going in Don’s and my family. Pinterest feeds right into the bulletin boards I was crazy about creating in my younger days but it bothers me that we’re telling cyberspace advertisers exactly what kinds of things we like. (As if Google doesn’t already know that.) And Instagram. Dear Instagram where I love the photos family posts and the concept that others can’t nab or share them, but I can’t seem to manage a cell phone picture without my thumb included so that leaves me out of the sharing process. No, I’ll stick to blogging where I hope/can pretend I have a connection with people who don’t care if the format is on its way to Horse-and-Buggy Land. If you are still reading this, thank you.

A far more interesting question, though, is why do people read personal blogs written by ordinary people, living ordinary lives? I can only speak for myself but I enjoy getting a window into how others feel about their day to day existence---the frustrations that get them down and things that make them feel joyful inside. I learn about myself from reading what others write, too. One of my favorite bloggers, for example, couldn’t be more different than I am when it comes to core values and life experiences but we are so spooky, scary alike in every other way that I just know we’d be great friends if we lived next door to one another. Without reading her blog, I never would have gotten beyond the labels we put on others to discover that, and that helps me when meeting new people in person. Reading personal blogs also makes me feel connected to a community when the isolation of going through life-crisis’s such Don’s disabilities and eventual death, then the whole widowhood “thing” could otherwise make me bat-poop crazy. We care about each other in cyberspace just as much as if we were talking over the back yard fence. At least that’s my view from here. Oops! My View From Here is the name of another one of my favorite blogs to read and I just plagiarized Donna’s catch phrase.

(Note: I wanted to say above, "...could make me bat-shit crazy..." but when I used the word 'sexual' in the title of a recent blog entry Bloggers sent me a notice that blogs with x-rated content will be turned private in the near-future. Oh, my, I thought, swearing content can’t be far behind on the no-no list if THAT post got tagged!)

A few people may already know this but I’m going to repeat it in this post because I’m old and that’s what old people do. Anyway, I started blogging a year after my husband’s stroke as sort of a gratitude journal and speech class diary. It was so hard back then to pull myself out of the darkness that goes with a life changing event like the massive stroke of someone you love. So I consciously made the decision that I couldn’t go to bed each night without first finding five good things to write down about my day. Before I knew it, I’d find myself saying during the day, “This should go in my journal” and that turned into seeing the funnier things that were happening in my world where I was a caregiver/wife to a wheelchair bound guy who worked very hard at building up his vocabulary. A vocabulary that turned out to be at its highest point only 25 unprompted words on a good day. When he died the bottom fell out of my world again and my blogs had to go with him.

Eleven days later, in January of 2012, this widowhood blog was born. Fast forward to now and here I am, knowing that the blog world has helped, does help and will help me again with whatever challenges life throws my way. It’s given me a place to spill my guts---my secrets, my desires, my fears, my disappointments and joys and my plans A, B and Cs. If you’ve been here often enough to see me put Band-Aids on my broken heart and rip them back off, thank you. If you’ve been here often enough to see me rub salt in my own wounds then wash it back out, thank you. If you’ve been here often enough to care if I ever put some real adventure into my widowhood days, as the blog title implies I should, a double thank you. ©

Who Shot the Cheyenne?

My husband had a couple of life-long friends and when they got together the stories would fly back and forth, laughter would bounce off the walls. If you look up the word ‘buddies’ in the dictionary, you’ll see a picture of the three of them. That’s how close they were. Back in 1978 Don and one of those friends went out west together on a hunting trip in Don’s brand new pick up truck with duel gas tanks and a custom leather interior. And when I say it was brand new I mean he literally picked it up from the dealership a few hours before picking up his friend.

Every where they went since they hit the state line of Wyoming people were staring at them so they decided to scout out a western clothing store. As naive as it sounds now they thought leather cowboy boots, Stetson hats and western cut shirts was going to change that. It didn’t, of course. They were Easterners who walked and talked too fast compared to the locals and new clothing wasn’t going to mask that. They might as well have bought t-shirts imprinted with the words: Two Guys on a Holiday!

After hunting a couple of days without success they decided the reason the antelope weren’t impressed enough by their marksmanship to do more than just look at them with amusement was because they needed to sight their rifles in for longer distances. So out in the middle of no where, with no witnesses around, Don sighted in his Winchester then stepped aside for his friend to do the same. Ron placed his Browning 30.6 across the hood of Don’s truck ever so carefully so he wouldn’t scratch the finish and then he pulled the trigger.

“Did you see where the bullet hit?” Ron asked.

“Right there,” Don replied in a deceptively calm voice as if what had just happened was an every day occurrence. He was pointing to a bullet hole in the hood of truck. Then Don did something that drained the color from Ron’s face and frozen him in place. He slowly drew his .38 pistol out of its holster and for a few seconds Ron saw his life flash before his eyes. Damn, he’d shot Don’s brand new Chevy Cheyenne and he was going to die for it! But Don had other plans. He plucked the new Stetson off his friend’s head, threw it up in the air and deftly put a bullet hole in one side of the crown and out the other.

“I’m just getting even with you,” Don said and if he was mad he sure didn’t show it. Then he put his pistol back in his holster and after some blustering and teasing back and forth Don told his friend not to worry about it, the dealership could fix it.

Ron, of course, was embarrassed and offered to pay for repairing the bullet hole---many times---but when they got back home Don had one excuse after another for not getting the body work done. Weeks turned into months. Months turned into years. And it wasn’t until Ron ran into a guy who was a co-worker of Don’s that he learned the true reason why that bullet hole never got repaired. Everyone who’d see that hole in the hood and would ask about it was an opportunity for Don, the master storyteller, to be at his best. The story of who shot the Cheyenne had become a legend, the ultimate hunting trip tale. With his great comedic timing and ability to turn a five minute event into a half hour hilarious story, the tale of the wounded Cheyenne always had Don’s listeners splitting their sides with laughter.

When the truck finally out-lived its usefulness and was loaded up on the back of a flatbed truck ready to go off to the junkyard it was missing a chunk of the hood. Don had cut a piece out, memorializing the bullet hole that inspired so many how-the-heck-did-that-happen questions.

The thing that was so amazing about my husband wasn’t his ability to tell a good story—although that was pretty amazing---it was his ability to adjust to not having any speech at all. In the 12 years after his stroke his working vocabulary consisted of a couple of dozen hard-earned nouns and the phrases, “Oh, boy!” and “Oh, Shit! and Oops!” But he didn’t let his losses him turn him bitter. He stayed good-natured, and he especially loved it when his life-long friend would come over and tell their two-buddies-on-a-hunting-holiday story. Over the years Don, Ron and I had all put our own spin on the minor details but one thing remained the same: none of us ever got tired of hearing the story about the day the Cheyenne got shot. ©